the psychologist
the
psychologist november 2017
november 2017
The rules of I S N E S L U R UN
www.thepsychologist.org.uk
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the psychologist
the
psychologist november 2017
november 2017
The rules of I S L NE S UN RU
contact The British Psychological Society 48 Princess Road East Leicester LE1 7DR 0116 254 9568 mail@bps.org.uk www.bps.org.uk the psychologist and research digest www.thepsychologist.org.uk www.bps.org.uk/digest www.jobsinpsychology.co.uk psychologist@bps.org.uk Twitter: @psychmag Download our iOS/Android apps advertising Reach 50,000+ psychologists at very reasonable rates. CPL, 1 Cambridge Technopark Newmarket Road Cambridge CB5 8PB recruitment Kai Theriault 01223 378051 kai.theriault@cpl.co.uk display Michael Niskin 01223 378 045 michael.niskin@cpl.co.uk october 2017 issue 52,015 dispatched design concept Darren Westlake www.TUink.co.uk cover Adapted from The Communist International, which emerged from the 1917 Russian Revolution printed by Warners Midlands plc on 100 per cent recycled paper issn 0952-8229 (print) 2398-1598 (online) © Copyright for all published material is held by the British Psychological Society unless specifically stated otherwise. As the Society is a party to the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) agreement, articles in The Psychologist may be copied by libraries and other organisations under the terms of their own CLA licences (www.cla.co.uk). Permission must be obtained for any other use beyond fair dealing authorised by copyright legislation. For further information about copyright and obtaining permissions, e-mail permissions@bps.org.uk.
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www.thepsychologist.org.uk
The Psychologist is the magazine of The British Psychological Society It provides a forum for communication, discussion and controversy among all members of the Society, and aims to fulfil the main object of the Royal Charter, ‘to promote the advancement and diffusion of a knowledge of psychology pure and applied’
The Psychologist needs you! We rely on your submissions throughout the publication, and in return we help you to get your message across to a large and diverse audience. For details of all the available options, plus our policies and what to do if you feel these have not been followed, see www.thepsychologist.org.uk/contribute The main message, though, is simply to engage with us. Contact the editor Dr Jon Sutton on jon.sutton@bps.org.uk, tweet us on @psychmag or call / write to us at the Society’s Leicester office.
Managing Editor Jon Sutton Assistant Editor Peter Dillon-Hooper Production Mike Thompson Journalist Ella Rhodes Editorial Assistant Debbie Gordon Research Digest Christian Jarrett (editor), Alex Fradera, Emma Young
Associate Editors Articles Michael Burnett, Paul Curran, Harriet Gross, Rebecca Knibb, Adrian Needs, Paul Redford, Sophie Scott, Mark Wetherell, Jill Wilkinson Conferences Alana James History of Psychology Alison Torn Interviews Gail Kinman Culture Kate Johnstone, Sally Marlow Books Emily Hutchinson, Rebecca Stack International panel Vaughan Bell, Uta Frith, Alex Haslam, Elizabeth Loftus, Asifa Majid The Psychologist and Digest Editorial Advisory Committee Catherine Loveday (Chair), Emma Beard, Phil Banyard, Harriet Gross, Kimberley Hill, Rowena Hill, Peter Olusoga, Richard Stephens, Miles Thomas
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psychologist november 2017
Mark Peterson/Getty Images
02 Letters 08 News Sexual abuse; Ig Nobels; awards; research; and more
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20 The changing workplace Six contributions consider the psychological intersect with economic, technological, social and environmental change
32 Hand in hand Sue Fletcher-Watson considers knowledge exchange in psychology 38 The rules of unruliness Stephen D. Reicher’s session for us from Latitude Festival
48 Eye on fiction: Making room for values and emotions Vivienne Laidler with an alternative perspective on Room on the Broom
52 From mythical idealisation to political and personal reality Joanna North on running an adoption support agency
60 ‘Imagine the brave new world’ Kavita Vedhara on her work with vaccine adjuvants
68 ‘I feel I’m contributing to science getting the impact it deserves’ Stavroula Kousta, Chief Editor of Nature Human Behaviour
70 Jobs in psychology
76 Culture Developing Hellblade
84 Books Including author Q+As 96 A to Z
I’m pretty interested in the changing workplace (see p.20), perhaps because I’ve been sitting in this chair for nearly 18 years. Three lessons from that time: the electric interweb, or more specifically finally launching a half decent website, changed the nature of The Psychologist overnight; change always takes far longer than you thought it would, and then happens all of a sudden; and the time to push for that change – bringing on board as many people as possible – is when you, personally, think everything is going really rather well. That last point puts me in mind of Stephen Reicher’s piece ‘The rules of unruliness’, a transcript from his session for us in the Wellcome Trust Arena at Latitude Festival (p.38). Change, revolution, in any area, is enhanced when we embrace the power and passion of the group and when we give careful thought to who is ‘we’ and who is ‘they’. Psychology has too often been the core of an industry telling us ‘No you can’t’. Now’s the time to respond ‘Yes we can’. Dr Jon Sutton Managing Editor @psychmag
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Revealing hidden issues O
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ne year since the publication of British Psychological Society guidelines on responding to disclosures of non-recent sexual abuse, we spoke to one of its authors, Consultant Clinical Psychologist Dr Khadj Rouf, about the many people the guidelines have reached and her concerns about cuts to services for survivors. Rouf (Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust) and her colleagues have so far reached three of the four UK nations speaking at conferences about the guidelines. These sessions, which have included presentations from academics, clinicians and survivors, have raised important discussions about the importance of survivorfocused services, including the need for routine enquiry about child sexual abuse (CSA) in clinical practice, the dangers of misdiagnosing the after-effects of trauma and the need for more psychologically informed practice. ‘I was pleased to see audience members from a range of backgrounds raising important issues around the complexities of responding to disclosures,’ Rouf said. She one of her co-authors, Benna Waites, will finish their four nations tour in spring 2018 at a special day-long Division of Clinical Psychology Wales event. Rouf, a survivor herself, said the conferences had emboldened her to share her own stories and artwork (e.g. ‘Untitled, 1988’, above), which she created as a teen
a few years after she disclosed her own abuse. She said she wanted to share the work to show the depths of despair survivors can feel, but also to give a message of hope that recovery is possible. However, she expressed deep concern over the direction in which many services are heading. ‘I’m very troubled by the national picture of shrinking state provision for vulnerable people… many charities and third-sector organisations are caught in a precarious funding position. I needed quite a lot of state support when I disclosed as a teenager, including social services, psychology, the police, legal aid and state benefits, as we were suddenly plunged into difficult financial circumstances. I also benefited from a full grant, which allowed me to take up a place at Oxford University. I am not sharing this for pity or praise, but because I am concerned that survivors coming after me may not get access to the kinds of services which helped me so much.’ A 2015 report by the Children’s Commissioner Anne Longfield said that while prevalence of CSA could be as high as 11 per cent, only an estimated one in eight survivors come to the attention of statutory authorities. The NSPCC’s most recent figures also show an increase in the number of child sexual abuse cases (which could, of course, reflect an increasing willingness to come forward). Are the services there to support them?
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the psychologist november 2017 news There are signs of certain groups within psychology moving towards having more of a focus on trauma and taking a lifespan approach in helping people, but without funding it is difficult to get these ideas off the ground. ‘Those trauma-informed services seem so exciting, but we need to make sure there’s consistency. How secure is the funding across the state and third sector? There are sexual abuse and rape crisis centres up and down the country which are overwhelmed at the moment. There’s a precarious situation for some services in terms of what money they can count on. There are some really exciting examples of what could be achieved out there, but there needs to be secure and sustained funding.’ Rouf is a passionate believer in psychology and the role of psychologists in helping survivors, and said that psychologists should be ambitious as a profession: ‘If psychologists see a gap in the services in their local area, I’d say call it out, step up and get involved. There’s a vital role for psychologists to play across all parts of society because we’re coming into contact with the public. We have a vital role to play in safeguarding, and psychologists can help in ensuring there are individual, systemic and group interventions.’ Rouf also emphasised that the published guidelines could be useful to a diverse range of healthcare professionals and psychologists – not just those working in clinical settings but academics as well. ‘During the conferences all kinds of people were interested in getting involved. Disclosures can occur in sexual health settings, cancer services, pain clinics and forensic settings. We divide ourselves into specialities, and maybe we have to do that, but people don’t live their lives like that. Disclosures can occur in settings such as schools, but also in unexpected settings, such as when people are doing research at university. All psychologists need to be aware of their safeguarding responsibilities and how to respond.’ John Slater, a survivor who has also spoken at all the conferences and shared his poem (see the online version of this piece), co-runs a male survivor peer support group in the Exeter area called Momentum. The group gives men of all ages and backgrounds a safe place to meet, talk and feel their emotions. Slater is an advocate for services making routine enquiries into clients’ history of sexual abuse. He also wants to see evidence-based and trauma-focused services, and he’s concerned that many services’ referral thresholds or critical criteria exclude people who are struggling deeply but ‘not enough’ to receive help. ‘Many people with difficulties relating to childhood sexual abuse will find the issues around abuse will not be dealt with in a Depression and Anxiety Service as this is outside their remit, and yet the criteria are not met for secondary services.’ Slater said while there were excellent and helpful services and projects in the statutory and voluntary sectors, the provision was patchy, underfunded and struggling for financial support: ‘The system is not geared to the needs of survivors, despite the large numbers in services. Much can be down to what is in your area, if you are a man or a woman, or the individual innovation of staff to run programmes. The scope for staff
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to be innovative and respond to need is reducing. I believe the vast majority of survivors’ needs are not met and only a restructuring to a trauma-informed approach will give any chance of that occurring.’ Another recurring issue for survivors is the lack of consistency in approaches to CSA across healthcare providers: ‘Survivors tell me they are concerned that with long-term contact with services, attitudes to CSA are not consistent. One worker being understanding, the next person avoiding and not relating to the issue. One person mentioned the great help they got from their therapist, but felt that was undermined by a lack of appreciation and understanding of the effects and process of trauma on them from their mental health worker. They would like to see a better understanding of CSA by all, not just some, of the staff they meet.’ Slater said: ‘Apart from routine enquiry being a helpful step in itself, it will place an onus on mental health services to demonstrate action to such disclosure, making a Trust more accountable to survivors… Routine enquiry, if done well, will also provide the evidence needed regarding the extent of childhood sexual abuse so it can no longer be a hidden issue of unknown scale.’ er If you have been affected by any of the issues discussed in this article contact The Survivor’s Trust (0808 801 0818 or www.thesurvivorstrust.org) or Samaritans (116 123 or www.samaritans.org). If you are concerned about a child, call the NSPCC on 0808 800 5000 or visit www.nspcc.org.uk.
Suicide position statement ‘The government must ensure investment in research into public mental health and research into a range of innovative brief psychosocial interventions to reduce suicidal ideation, suicidal behaviours and deaths by suicide.’ This is one of the calls to action announced in the British Psychological Society’s new position statement Understanding and Preventing Suicide: A Psychological Perspective. The position statement has been produced with the contributions of Professor Ella Arensman, Dr Catherine Crane, Professor Rory O’Connor, Professor Siobhan O’Neill, Professor Ellen Townsend and Dr Susan Rasmussen. The statement also notes that ‘whilst there has been some progress made in tackling stigma and discrimination there is still considerable work to be done. Improved training and education in health, social care and educational settings are needed to understand better the barriers in asking for help. This requires increased government investment to support it and expert psychological input to ensure it is appropriately designed and delivered.’ Read the position statement now at tinyurl.com/ bpssuicide
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Is that me or my twin? Can twins recognise themselves in photos? What are the neural bases for being disgusted by cheese? Research questions such as these can only mean one thing: this year’s Ig Nobel Prize winners have been announced. The Ig Nobel prize is awarded across the science disciplines for papers that first make us laugh, then make us think. During the ceremony winners are presented with a 10 trillion-dollar bill (from Zimbabwe) by actual Nobel Laureates and given 60 seconds to make a speech which, if overlong, is interrupted by an eightyear-old girl repeating ‘Please stop. I’m bored’ until they finish. This was the 27th ‘first annual’ Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, which saw the premiere of The Incompetence Opera, a mini-opera that presents a musical encounter with the Peter principle and the DunningKruger effect, about how and why incompetent people rise to the top – and what that implies for everybody. Marc Abrahams, master of ceremonies, and Editor of the magazine Annals of Improbable Research, which started the event,
closed the ceremony with the traditional: ‘If you didn’t win an Ig Nobel Prize tonight – and especially if you did – better luck next year.’ Researchers in the UK and France won the Medicine Prize for their attempts to measure the extent to which some people are disgusted by cheese – which a surprising amount of people are. Jean-Pierre Royet, David Meunier, Nicolas Torquet, Anne-Marie Mouly and Tao Jiang found in their fMRI study that the internal and external globus pallidus and the substantia nigra are more activated in participants who are anti-cheese. The winner in the cognition category was a study with the title ‘Is that me or my twin? Lack of self-face recognition advantage in identical twins’. Psychologists Matteo Martini, Ilaria Bufalari, Maria Antonietta Stazi and Salvatore Maria Aglioti explored the difficulty twins have in recognising themselves. They concluded that ‘to distinguish the self from the co-twin, monozygotic twins have to rely much more than control participants on the multisensory
integration processes upon which the sense of bodily self is based. Moreover, in keeping with the notion that attachment style influences perception of self and significant others, we propose that the observed self/co-twin confusion may depend upon insecure attachment.’ The Economics Prize winners Matthew Rockloff and Nancy Greer (Central Queensland University) explored whether contact with a live crocodile affects a person’s willingness to gamble – it does! And researchers in Spain won the Obstetrics Prize for finding that a developing human fetus responds more strongly to music that is played electromechanically inside the mother’s vagina than to music that is played electromechanically on the mother’s belly. There’s even a product based on this research – the Babypod. er For a full list of winners, links to their papers and a recording see www.improbable.com/ig/ winners/#ig2017. Find more improbable research in our archive.
Communicating psychology
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Psychologist and radio presenter Claudia Hammond has received the British Academy President’s Medal for her work in improving public understanding of psychology through broadcasting and writing for wider audiences. At its 2017 Prizes and Medals ceremony, held in central London, the Academy recognised a host of academics, broadcasters, writers and entrepreneurs for their distinction in – and dedication to – the subjects that make up the arts, humanities and social sciences. Professor Sir David Cannadine, President of the British Academy, who hosted the ceremony, said of the winners: ‘They have blazed new trails through their disciplines, shown dedication of the highest order and, through their work, furthered understanding of what it means to be human.’ Speaking to us in 2009 [see our website], Hammond recounted her days working local radio between school and university: ‘Claudia’s Sunday Requests on Hospital Radio Bedford was not an award-winning production… I started it when I was 14. I went round the wards asking
for requests and I found myself going in earlier and staying longer. Patients told me their stories and details of their illnesses and treatments. This was what got me interested in psychology, maybe what even led to me doing a postgraduate degree in health psychology.’ On her hopes for the future, she said: ‘What I hope might happen is that just as the field of economics is suddenly catching on to the decades of psychological research on decision-making, that other fields might start to do the same and to realise that there’s all this research out there which could be put into practice. Expert panels and commissions wouldn’t dream of not including an economist. I’d like to see a day when they all have a psychologist too.’ The Wiley Prize in Psychology this year rewards lifetime achievement by an outstanding international scholar, and is awarded to Professor Stanislas Dehaene (INSERM-CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit) for his contribution to the study of the cognitive neuroscience of numeracy, literacy and consciousness.
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Children as young as four believe in karma Even the most scientifically trained among us have an instinct for mystical thinking – seeing purpose in nature, for example, or reading meaning in random coincidences. Psychologists think this is to do with the way our minds work at a fundamental level. We have evolved to be highly attuned to concepts relevant to our social lives, things like intentions and fairness. And we just can’t switch off this way of thinking, even when we’re contemplating the physical world. This may explain the intuitive appeal of the Buddhist and Hindu notion of karmic justice – the idea, essentially, that you get what you deserve in life; that the cosmos rewards those who do good (variations of this idea are also spread by other religions). Indeed, in a new paper in Developmental Science, psychologists at Yale University have shown that children in the US as young as four are inclined to believe in, and actively seek, karmic justice, regardless of whether they come from a religious family or not. ‘We conclude that, beginning early in development, children expect that life events are not purely random occurrences, but instead that they happen for an intended reason, such as rewarding people for their good behaviour,’ said the study authors Konika Banerjee and Paul Bloom. In one experiment, 20 children aged four to six, tested alone, were told that if a completely random coin shake landed the right way up they would get a super cool glow-in-thedark water wiggle toy. Then they were given some stickers to say thanks for taking part. Before the coin was shaken, they were told about two other kids doing the same challenge, one of whom gave his stickers away to needy children because he thought this would increase his chances of winning the toy; the other child threw her stickers in the bin because she thought this would increase her winning chances. Each participant was asked which child they thought was correct, and then they were
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given the chance to copy their actions (there was a donation box and a bin in the testing room). Overall, the participating children expressed a belief in the karmic strategy (giving stickers away to needy children would boost their own chances of winning the toy), certainly much more than they believed in the rubbish bin strategy. Moreover, of the 45 per cent of the kids who tried out a strategy for themselves, nearly all of them tried the karmic strategy (only one child tried the rubbish bin strategy). This bias for believing in karma was true regardless of whether the children were from a religious family or not.
In a second experiment, 40 more children (aged five to six) were shown cartoon vignettes about other children trying to achieve something (e.g. a girl trying to find her lost puppy), and who used different strategies to boost their chances, either involving karmic bargaining (e.g. being friendly to a new girl at school), or a non-karmic strategy (e.g. making her hair shorter). For each vignette, two different fictional characters gave their opposing verdicts on the likely effectiveness of the karmic strategy. For instance, one character said that being friendly to a new girl would help find the puppy because if you do something nice, it helps something nice happen to you. The other character was sceptical – yes, it is nice to do something kind for someone else, but that doesn’t help make some unrelated good thing happen to you. The participating children were asked which character they
thought was right and they far more often endorsed the character who was in favour of the effectiveness of the karmic strategy. A further control condition showed this wasn’t simply because of a generic bias for causal explanations (where any one thing is said to cause another), but was specifically for karmarelated causal strategies where doing something nice increases the odds of an unrelated favourable outcome occurring for oneself. Again, the children’s belief in karma was unrelated to whether they came from a religious background or not. One final experiment with fourto six-year-old kids clarified things a little further, showing that young children tend to have a rather ‘diffuse’ notion of karma – that is, they think the odds of something nice happening to them are increased not only by their doing something nice themselves, but also by someone else doing good in the world. Banerjee and Bloom think young children’s belief in cosmic karma is probably an extension of their early belief in social karma – the generally accurate notion that if you do someone a favour, they are likely to reciprocate in due course. In other words, it’s another example of the way that we ‘overextend inferences and expectations from the social domain to the non-social domain’ (similar to how we so readily attribute meaning and purpose to the inanimate world, such as thinking that trees make oxygen so that animals can breathe). The researchers added: ‘Taken together, our findings support the view that notions of karma may be so cross-culturally successful because they capitalise on certain more generally social-cognitive propensities and heuristics for navigating our social relationships that are present and active early in development.’ Dr Christian Jarrett for the Research Digest www.bps.org.uk/digest Read the article: tinyurl.com/ y9vsjegq
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Research digest People who score higher on the trait ‘need for uniqueness’ are more inclined to believe in conspiracy theories. In fact, for these people, learning that a conspiracy is doubted by the majority actually makes it more appealing, presumably because believing in it satisfies their need to feel special (European Journal of Social Psychology) Many of us see binge-watching TV with our partners as a guilty pleasure, but it could also have an important benefit. Researchers found that people who said they shared more media with their partner, including TV films or books, also tended to rate their relationship more positively. More work is need to establish a causal link (Journal of Personality and Social Relationships) There has been a lot of hype about the concept of ‘grit’, but a new series of studies has questioned its relevance to at least one important outcome – creative achievement. Researchers were unable to find a significant association between students’ grit levels and their creativity, either based on self-reported achievements or their peers’ assessment of the originality of their work (Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts) Media stories have suggested that learning a second language could help protect us from the ravages of dementia by increasing our ‘cognitive reserve’. However, a new systematic review and meta-analysis found no evidence that bilinguals were less likely to develop dementia symptoms over time, and the researchers’ official recommendations that bilingualism can delay dementia should be dropped (Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease) Perhaps young teenagers are simply too cynical to benefit from mindfulness. That was the conclusion of a team of researchers from Flinders University in Australia after their latest failure to find any benefits of a school mindfulness programme, even though they had added extra elements designed to increase its effectiveness, such as improved homework materials and parental involvement (Behaviour Research and Therapy) By Dr Christian Jarrett. These studies were covered, along with many more, by him, Dr Alex Fradera and Emma Young on our Research Digest at www.bps.org.uk/digest where you can also listen to the podcast, PsychCrunch. 12
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What a wonderful world In the words of Sam Cooke, I ‘Don’t know much biology’, so it was with some trepidation that I attended my first Psychobiology Section Annual Meeting. I needn’t have worried: this was no reductionists’ retreat but a meeting of minds and matter that had both feet firmly in the real world. Right from the off, physiological processes were linked to important societal issues, starting with Dr Mark Wetherell’s continuing exploration of the way caregiver stress has consequences, such as everyday memory lapses. He made the point that deficits in the lab may not translate into realworld detriments in care, because ‘the carers adopt strategies and coping mechanisms to make damn sure they don’t’ – but this in itself adds significantly to the care burden. Wetherell’s Northumbria University colleague Dr Philippa Jackson then looked at whether polyphenols could improve cognition and mood, finding that apple and coffee berry extract did indeed increase alertness and reduce mental fatigue, perhaps through an increase in cerebral blood flow. Following the undergraduate prize for Thanusha Manohor (University of Portsmouth), for a project investigating how heart EEG reflects how a person is either attending to the environment (‘intake’) or rejecting it, we had a wonderful keynote from Professor Kavita Vedhara (University of Nottingham). Making the ‘life and death’ nature of this conference explicit, Vedhara took us from fertility to mortality, with a fascinating stop on the way around vaccination. At pains to emphasise clinical relevance, Vedhara noted: ‘Nobody in this room needs to be persuaded that there are links between mind and body. We’re interested not in their existence, but in whether they affect disease vulnerability and progression; whether they persist even after you control for other known determinants relevant to the disease and/or its treatment.’ In the first of these areas, Vedhara explained that stress is often cited as a causal factor in infertility, but the actual evidence is mixed. Measuring acute and chronic levels of cortisol in saliva and hair respectively, in 190 women undergoing IVF, Vedhara showed (for the first time) that it was only chronic levels of stress – in the three months before treatment – that predicted whether or not the women became pregnant. At the other end of the lifespan, Vedhara considered psychological influences on the healing of diabetic foot ulcers – a condition with a five-year mortality rate higher than some forms of cancer. Confrontational coping emerged as important – perhaps counter-intuitively, those who attempted to tackle their problem head-on were less likely to have a healed ulcer six months later. Vedhara explained this in terms of poorquality and conflicting health information leading to unhelpful behaviours (step forward the patient who let his ulcer breathe, and walked around on the carpet to ‘soak it up’). Lay beliefs about illness and mortality were also implicated: time to death was more rapid in patients who were more affected emotionally by their ulcers, who felt their ulcers had more serious consequences and would last for a long time, who believed they experienced more symptoms, and that they could do little to influence ulcer outcomes. Again, the way Vedhara controlled for and homed in on clinically relevant variables was impressive, as was her desire to take this to the next level through prospective studies and psychological interventions. The latter point was uppermost in her discussion of ‘vaccine adjuvants’: who knew that vaccines don’t
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work with everyone, and that something as simple as mood on the day of vaccination could be an important and viable target for manipulation? The second day began with ‘a talk about how to do research without a budget’, from Dr James Jackson (Leeds Trinity University). Getting a women’s rugby team and controls to stick their hands on a photocopier, he found that women with a left-hand 2D:4D ratio of 1.00 or above were 10 times more likely to engage in contact sports. This was followed by an intriguing suggestion from Dr Sarita Robinson (University of Central Lancashire) that psychosocial factors in oral health may have a knock-on effect on Alzheimer’s disease, through bacteria from the mouth getting into the brain and causing inflammatory responses. The effect of poor sleep was also considered, as the lymphatic system is activated during sleep and uses glial water to clear pathogens from brain. Sleep restriction was also the focus for Dr Chris Alford (University of the West of England), in relation to driving distraction. The folk idea of switching on the radio to overcome drifting attention on the road received some experimental support in the driving simulators, but this was still not able to truly overcome the detrimental effects of sleep loss. Turning to technology, Dr Catherine Loveday (University of Westminster) outlined some of her work using pictures as extremely powerful cues for remembering. From a Wellcome art-science project on St Kilda to a guided tour of London, her use of the Autographer lifelogging camera with a patient with amnesia showed how ‘the whole thing comes to life’ with the visually aided recall. Professor Julie TurnerCobb (Bournemouth University) then outlined the use of a robot panel in a social stress testing paradigm, and Dr Ann-Marie Creavan (University of Limerick) spoke on enhancing the reproducibility of cardiovascular stress research through a standardised protocol across Galway, Limerick and Cork. This led nicely to Professor Marcus Munafò’s guest lecture on scientific ecosystems and research reproducibility. At the heart of his whistlestop tour of the ‘replication crisis’ is the idea that the pressures on researchers shape their behaviours, typically in unconscious ways, and that the drivers of the problems are the things that psychologists are well placed to understand. Munafò rails against the highly curated version of science we see – publication bias, p-value fishing, overselling, post-hoc storytelling, the lure of sparkly ‘groundbreaking’ results, which leave us building nothing of true significance. Take the ‘garden of forking paths’, which is how many researchers work through their data to a conclusion that suits them. ‘Unless you tell your readers the number of times you rolled the dice, that p value is basically uninterpretable… People are leveraging chance by exploring the analytical space and just presenting one path from it. Which one are you going to choose if you’re going for your first postdoc,
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your first lectureship, your first chair?’ Over 90 per cent of published psychology findings claim to have found what they set out to look for in the first place, and as Munafò says that surely can’t be right. Yet what is good for scientists is not necessarily what is good for science. The current system selects for people who work in a bad way, Munafò argues, treating academics ‘as furry rodents foraging for academic success’. Thankfully, Munafò is not a moaner: his is a positive approach, of ‘opportunity not crisis’, arguing for ‘quality control at every stage of the pipeline’. We must ‘turn the scientific method in on how we do science and think “Can we do better?”’ And psychology, through key players such as Munafò himself and Chris Chambers, has indeed led the way in areas such as pre-registration and open science. Journals and funding bodies are making improvements, with the next REF set to reward a body of evidence rather than single eyecatching studies. The key group that has done least, Munafò says, is the institutions. Greater attention must be paid to high-quality work, and promoting on the basis of it. Again, so much of the solution comes down to the ‘scientific ecosystem’, and the thorny issue of human nature. Academics are told that they are supposed to become known for one thing: ‘We end up painting ourselves into a corner,’ Munafò says. ‘It’s hard to admit that 20 years’ of research is wrong.’ The final day saw talks including ‘emotional snacking’ and its relationship with sleep quality in Type 1 diabetes, via ‘altered neuroendocrine sleep architecture’ (Dr Michael Smith, Northumbria University); disgust as a behavioural immune system (Dr Lorenzo Stafford, University of Portsmouth); and Dr Chris Alford (University of the West of England) on 5HTP (a natural serotonin precursor, available over the counter) in daytime mood and night sleep. Gail Lincoln (University of Westminster) brought psychological and biological measures together, in quantitative and qualitative form, to consider why older homeowners decide to ‘downsize’ or stay. Take home message: if you’re going to do it, move before the age of 76! Finally, Dr Richard Stephens (Keele University) supported the idea that physical and social pain (being excluded from a computer game Cyberball) are linked, and that ‘directed swearing’ can be a practical strategy for reducing such pain. It even has a name – lalochezia. This annual meeting, in the Lake District, is billed as ‘where the science is as good as the view’. I’d go further (and not just because it rained a lot): the science is better, and all areas of psychology have a lot to learn from it. What a wonderful world, indeed!
Professor Marcus Munafò
See p.60 for an interview with Professor Kavita Vedhara; we’ll meet Professor Marcus Munafò in a future edition.
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Mentally well voice-hearers have a heightened ability to detect real speech
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Hallucinating voices isn’t always distressing. While the experience is commonly associated with schizophrenia, some people – an estimated 5 to 15 per cent of the general population – hear voices that aren’t real without finding it upsetting or debilitating (they may even welcome it) and without any of the other symptoms of psychosis, such as delusions or confusion. Now new open-access research published in Brain has revealed a perceptual advantage for this group of people: they can detect hard-tocomprehend speech sounds more quickly and easily than people who have never hallucinated a voice. The study, led by Ben AldersonDay at the University of Durham, involved 12 ‘non-clinical voice hearers’ and 17 controls (matched for age, sex, handedness, education and National Adult Reading Test scores) who do not hear voices. While their brains were scanned using fMRI, the volunteers listened to a series of socalled ‘sine-wave’ speech recordings. These recordings of spoken sentences – such as ‘The clown had a funny face’ – were acoustically altered so that they were either totally unintelligible, or potentially intelligible. Initially, many people report that potentially intelligible sine-wave speech sounds like ‘aliens’ or birdsong. But with training, it’s possible to recognise and understand the distorted words. During the first part of the study, the volunteers had no idea that it was about speech perception. They were asked simply to press a button every time they heard a distinctive target sound. It was only after 20 minutes that they were asked if they’d noticed any words or sentences among the recordings they’d just listened to, and if so, to indicate when they had first noticed them and whether they had been able to understand any of them. Nine out of 12 voice-hearers (75 per cent) said they’d realised
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words were contained in the sounds, compared with eight (47 per cent) of the non voice-hearers, and the voicehearers noticed the words earlier, on average. Seven of the voicehearers and five of the controls said they could understand the words, and five in each group could accurately recall some of them. After this first 20-minute run, the volunteers were trained in how to listen for words in sine-wave speech. Then the trial was repeated, and, afterwards they were again queried about what they’d heard. For both groups, the training helped, but this time, the voice-hearers’ performance was no better than the controls. Other work on people in the early stages of psychosis has found that they are better at identifying objects in an ambiguous visual scene than healthy controls, if they are primed about what to look for. Prior expectation seems to give them a superior ability – compared with controls – to spot genuine signals in noise. In this study, being explicitly primed to listen for speech didn’t benefit the voice-hearers any more than the controls, so something different seems to be going on compared with the detection of visual patterns in psychosis. The fMRI scans showed that, like the controls, the voice-hearers’ brains responded differently to potentially intelligible versus unintelligible sine-wave speech. This suggests that voice-hearers aren’t biased to hear speech in any sound, but only when there is the possibility of a meaningful signal being present. The scans also revealed a key difference between the brain activity of the voice-hearers and the controls. In both, the potentially intelligible recordings engaged the brain network typically active in normal voice processing, but the voicehearers showed stronger responses to this kind of speech in two regions:
the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and the superior frontal gyrus (responses that were not seen when the recording was unintelligible). ‘This suggests an enhanced involvement of attention and sensorimotor processes, selectively when speech was potentially intelligible,’ the research team writes. ‘This suggests that the fundamental mechanisms underlying hallucination involve – and may develop from – ordinary perceptual processes, illustrating the continuity of mundane and unusual experience.’ This has implications for understanding the significant number of people who hallucinate voices but do not need psychiatric care. It also feeds in to the idea that, within the general population, there’s a continuum of experiences normally associated – in their extremes – with psychosis. Emma Young for the Research Digest www.bps.org.uk/digest Read the article: tinyurl.com/ ybdczc76
Award for brain development research The late Professor Annette Karmiloff-Smith and husband Professor Mark Johnson (Birkbeck University) have been jointly awarded the William Thierry Preyer Award. The European Association of Developmental Psychology recognised their work at the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development (CBCD) at Birkbeck. Co-Director of the CBCD, Johnson, who will take up the post of Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Cambridge this month, has researched the functional development of the brain in the first years of life with particular focus on how cognitive functions emerge within certain regions. KarmiloffSmith’s research showed that models used in adult neuropsychology were inappropriate for looking at neurodevelopmental problems in children and, instead, focused on tracing cognitive outcomes back to their basic-level origins in infancy.
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the psychologist november 2017 news
What good looks like While approximately one in four children and young people show signs of a mental health problem only around 25 to 40 per cent of them receive help from a mental health professional – if at all. The evidence on psychological support in schools and colleges has recently been reviewed by the British Psychological Society Faculty for Children, Young People and their Families. What Good Looks Like in Psychological Services for Schools and Colleges: Primary Prevention, Early Intervention and Mental Health Provision discusses the practical ways in which psychological wellbeing can be addressed in school settings, as well as the implications for commissioning and delivery of provision. The document is free to access and also contains various case studies of applied psychologists working with individuals, schools and services. The review makes 17 recommendations including the need for a better system to recognise problems early on to ensure the right help is provided at the right time – and to reduce the strain on CAMHS services. It suggests that the Department of Health and Public Health England should be involved in developing national policy, guidance and interventions to reduce known risk factors based on psychological evidence. To help those who may not traditionally come to clinical services, the review proposes the provision of specialist support in schools, including CAMHS teams. The authors also recommend giving teachers and school staff more training and support to help them identify when a child or young person’s distress exceeds normal levels, for example after a bereavement. Julia Faulconbridge, BPS Division of Clinical Psychology Child Lead and review author, said that in a climate of limited resources, and rising demand, there was clear evidence that embedding psychological services in schools was an effective way of identifying and working with children and young people’s mental health needs. ‘We believe psychologically healthy schools with support for the wellbeing of staff and students should be a priority. I think that it is a great opportunity to really build the resilience of children and young people when primary prevention and early intervention are delivered in schools. For many children and young people and families, but importantly not for all, mental health services in school make them more accessible too.’ The review emphasises the importance of taking a holistic view of children, young people, their schools and families, and recommends involving families in decisions about the support a young person receives. The authors also suggest creating a whole-school culture that encourages social cohesion and discourages bullying. They also highlight the needs of children and young people with chronic physical illnesses and disabilities who are at an inflated risk of developing mental health problems. While the document was written by clinical psychologists, Faulconbridge said the issues raised concerned all applied psychologists working in school
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Faculty for Children, You & their Fam ng People ilies
The Child & Family Psycholog Clinical y Review No 5 Autu
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What goo d look services fo s like in psychologic r schools Primary pr and colleg al evention, ea es rly intervention and mental hea lth provisio n ISSN: 2396-86
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settings. Appendix A of the document reads: ‘Clinical and educational psychologists working in schools share some common skills and approaches and contribute different specialist skills, so their work is most effective if it is integrated. Both groups emphasise the importance of training, support and consultation for school staff. The common factor in applied psychologists’ work with schools is understanding a child’s problems or symptoms in context, rather than solely at an individual level. In schools and colleges, relevant contexts, which can maintain psychological problems or support positive change, often include a child’s classroom environment, peer group, parental mental health, poverty and a great range of other possible influences.’ er To download a free PDF of the report, see tinyurl.com/ybyyqrwd News online: Find more news at www.thepsychologist.org.uk/reports, including: Madeleine Pownall reports from the RAISE (Researching, Advancing, and Inspiring Student Engagement) annual conference; Kawthar Alli reports from the International Social and Psychological Approaches to Psychosis conference in Liverpool, with the theme ‘Making real change happen’; and more For much more of the latest peer-reviewed research, digested, see www.bps.org.uk/digest Do you have a potential news story? Email us on psychologist@bps.org.uk or tweet @psychmag.
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Our award-winning books
Above, Professor Barbara Sahakian; Top right, Professor Julie Turner-Cobb; Bottom right, Professor Kevin Laland
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Could human evolution have occurred without culture? Should we brain scan people for potential signs of terrorism? These fascinating questions, and many others, have been posed by the winning books in this year’s British Psychological Society Book Awards. This year’s Popular Science category winners were Professor Barbara Sahakian and Dr Julia Gottwald (both University of Cambridge) with their book Sex, Lies & Brain Scans: How fMRI Reveals What Really Goes On in Our Minds. The book explores important ethical questions raised by the increasing use of brain imaging. Dr Gottwald said ‘Neuroimaging is progressing rapidly. Exciting new applications might become possible sooner than we think. But new opportunities bring new risks. Would we want to screen for terrorists at the airport using mind-reading technology? Which applications are justified, which ones cross the line? These issues concern all of us and the time is ripe to have a discussion about the ethics and limitations of brain imaging.’ Sahakian added: ‘I was delighted to receive the British Psychological Society Book Award, together with my former PhD student Julia Gottwald. I think it is wonderful that people are interested in and want to learn more about psychology and neuroscience and that they want to read and discuss how novel findings in these areas impact on our society. I regard engagement of the public in science as one of my favourite and most important activities.’ Professor Graham Towl (University of Durham) and Dr Tammi Walker (University of Manchester) won in the Practitioner Text category with their book Preventing SelfInjury and Suicide in Women’s Prisons. The book draws on the largest study of suicides from 1978 to 2014 drawing upon more than 100 cases of women who have died by suicide in prisons. The authors said they wanted to write the book due to a shared interest in women in prisons and prisoner suicide, and a shared belief that prisoners’ lives matter. They told us the book had received a very positive reception, but added: ‘There appears to be comparatively little public or political interest in this vital area. But for us, all the more reason to write about it and highlight the shamefully high rates and numbers of death by suicide of women prisoners.’ Towl said he was surprised when researching the book that, when the number of recorded suicides in prisons hit the milestone of 100 deaths, it went completely unreported: ‘I was also surprised by the full extent to which prisons are more toxic for men than women, it was stark in terms of the impacts upon an inflated risk of suicide. Another surprise was just how much the pattern of suicides by age group was so different for women than
men. Important because there is a real danger than such marked differences go unnoticed in assessments.’ The Textbook winner this year was Child Health Psychology: A Biopsychosocial Perspective by Professor Julie Turner-Cobb (Bournemouth University). The book takes an interdisciplinary and lifecourse perspective, drawing on theories and models within health psychology as applied to children – the first textbook to do this. The first part of the book covers topics related to events and circumstances that can influence a child’s health during childhood and adolescence including the prenatal environment; whilst the second part examines how children cope when they are ill, how they deal with pain, the experience of parental ill health and bereavement. ‘The book draws on a wide variety of research in health psychology and related disciplines and draws from work across a wide range of methodologies,’ TurnerCobb said. ‘It takes a strong biological stance in many respects, but also gives attention to psychosocial issues in relation to context and individual differences. There is also a chapter in the first part of the book that examines methodological and ethical issues in child health psychology, that includes assessment using endocrine and immune biomarkers of stress but also discusses the utility of using a range of different paradigms and settings.’ Turner-Cobb said she had been delighted to win the BPS award: ‘The book has had a very positive reception – as well as content, I have had feedback from students and academics that they have enjoyed the style of writing used, that it has brought together areas in ways they had not found in other books.’ Professor of behavioural and evolutionary biology Kevin Laland (University of St Andrews) won the Academic Monograph category with his book Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind. It explores how the human mind, and its ability to create and transmit culture, evolved from its roots in animal behaviour. Laland presents a theory on culture and how it is, not only the end product of the evolution of man, but also the key driving force behind it (read more at tinyurl.com/klaland). On being asked how he felt winning this BPS award, Laland said: ‘I honestly couldn’t be more thrilled. I feel very honoured, particularly as I am more a biologist than a psychologist. Writing a monograph is such hard work – one can pour one’s heart and soul into it for years – so getting a little reward at the end is very much appreciated. er
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the psychologist november 2017 news
Finding answers to burning questions Burn injuries affect around 250,000 people in the UK each year and can have a marked impact on wellbeing. While many standardised questionnaires, known as PROMs (patient reported outcome measures), exist for patients, few are specific to burns. At the BPS Division of Health Psychology Annual Conference in Cardiff, Dr Catrin Griffiths was speaking about her research to develop a burn-specific PROM questionnaire to better identify what burns patients needs in terms of care and support. So far in her work Dr Griffiths has conducted two systematic reviews on PROMs currently used in adult and paediatric burn care. She has also carried out interviews with patients and family members about living with a burn injury, drafted and had patients and healthcare professionals review the PROMs, and put the PROMs through a large psychometric study with the final survey expected to be published soon. The scale, known as the CARe Burn Scales, assesses psychological, social and physical wellbeing as well as a number of domains related to appearance. These measures of appearance-related domains came out in Griffith’s interviews, she explained some of the key factors which patients and healthcare professionals raised. Scarring can have a huge impact on people’s lives: Griffiths said some people can struggle to adjust and just the process of looking in a mirror can lead to people remembering the potentially traumatic event that caused the injury, as well as not being able to recognise themselves. These changes in appearance came out as one of the hardest aspects of living with a burn injury, in spite of the huge amounts of physical pain they cause. Appearance is also a key part of social functioning (see image above, by Joanne de Nobriga). Patients reported having increased attention and unwanted comments after their injuries drawing their
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own attention back to their scarring. A fear of this kind of reaction led people to avoid intimate relationships, social situations and hobbies like swimming, and, as Griffiths explained, this gave patients short-term relief but, in the long run led to increased anxiety associated with those activities. However, many people said social skills helped them cope. Over time and with experience and support from psychologists, friends and family, people built stronger social skills which helped with their general confidence. The huge importance of social skills, Griffiths said, would be a key area which psychologists could be involved with. In interviews with healthcare professionals Griffiths found some of the key things in helping people with burn injuries was having an
awareness of an individual’s cultural background and how this can affect adjustment and engagement. Some cultures place a lot of emphasis on appearance and this, at times, can be a barrier to patients receiving appearance-related support. Clinicians also said appearance concerns change over the lifespan, so it’s key to measure them regularly. Four of the subscales within PROMS measure appearance concerns, including scarring, avoidance behaviours, social skills and romantic relationships. Once it is published the scale will be available via www.careburnscales. org.uk er Read more reports from the Division of Health Psychology conference with the online version of this article at tinyurl.com/ya4dkujf
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The changing workplace Six contributions consider how the pace of economic, technological, social and environmental change requires a re-evaluation of how we work now and in the future
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ccupational psychologists contribute across a range of areas in the work domain: psychological assessment (including recruitment and selection); learning, training and development; wellbeing; work design; human-technology system design; organisational change and development;
and leadership, motivation and engagement. In recent years, occupational psychologists representing the British Psychological Society have promoted approaches to culture change within the NHS in responses to the Francis Report, developed guidance for improving the environmental responsibility of organisations and considered assessment centre standards. But how is their role changing, and what does the future hold?
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the psychologist november 2017 changing workplace
A digital world Parvin Begum looks at the impact of technology on learning used gamification to engage leaders in training and The world we live in has become increasingly wellexperience what it means to be a leader. It has created connected and integrated, and will only become even a virtual academy that contains video lectures, in-depth more so. Rapid advances in technology have enabled courses, tests and quizzes. Learners are awarded badges companies to compete in the global economy in for completing each online learning, which then addition to local and national markets. Information puts them on a leaderboard, thus encouraging peer technology has created the communication network competition to be at the top! to facilitate the expansion of products, and the sharing With avatar-based tools, learners are able to create of ideas and resources among people regardless of visual representations of themselves that engage the geographic location. This creation of efficient and learner with the ability to explore and manipulate effective channels to exchange information has been objects, structures and metaphorical representations the catalyst for globalisation. of ideas. These technologies create simulated Organisational learning has been identified by environments that have the potential to offer a superior experts such as Tomas Hult as an important factor learning experience through increased ‘representational for organisations to achieve a competitive advantage fidelity’ realism of the environment, ‘immediacy of in dynamic markets. It is crucial for employees to control’ by the user, and a sense of ‘presence’, thus continue to learn new knowledge if a company is to leading to higher levels of active learner participation. remain current. When employees gain new insights, 3D virtual environments have been used to train they are able to incorporate these into products, nuclear power plant workers in Japan, to teach processes and services, and empirical studies by astronauts how to repair space telescopes, and to Joaquín Alegre and Ricardo Chiva have suggested train surgeons on a variety of medical procedures. that such new knowledge is the basis for innovation. There’s clearly a world of opportunities to Organisations that value employees’ learning can enable learning through these expect to be more innovative and technologies. However, care competitive in the marketplace. “Learning needs to be should be taken when using VR Technology has had a massive platforms: a number of studies impact in the way learning is relevant, high-quality, have found that learners can have taking place. Digital learning now focused and tailored to difficulty navigating hypermedia encompasses webinars, ebooks, individual needs” environments, becoming ‘lost in massive open online courses hyperspace’ with no idea of how (MOOCs), social media and they arrived at a node and no clear online communities, podcasts and microblogging. Learning in organisations can now take model of the overall environment structure. Headmounted displays for some VR platforms can also lead place in virtual classrooms, learning simulations and to headaches and nausea in some when used over a games; and apps on smartphones and tablets make learning on the go possible. Learning has become more prolonged period. Whilst digital learning platforms allow access integrated with work with the use of shorter, more to a vast amount of information and ‘just in time’ modular ‘just-in-time’ delivery methods. learning, it does need to be appropriately presented Companies like PepsiCo have incorporated digital and resourced. Making digital learning available to learning into their strategy; learners complete a course unprepared and unsupported learners is unlikely together by taking sections of the same e-learning on to be effective. Learning needs to be relevant, hightheir own and then meeting every couple of weeks quality, focused and tailored to individual needs. If it’s for discussions. This is designed to allow a group of learners to complete a course virtually while enhancing not, learners are likely to switch to ‘mental autopilot’. With online text it is easy to get distracted, following the learning process through social and collaborative links from pages and flitting between different courses means. This is an example of the ‘flipped’ classroom and sites. In her 2011 paper on the neuroscience model, where the knowledge transfer is done online of learning, Sylvia Vorhauser-Smith explained that asynchronously with the discussion on that learning without focused attention, learning is not embedded. done face-to-face. It is important to revisit previously learnt information Another recent development is the use of and find opportunities to teach, summarise or do tests game-based platforms and virtual reality (VR) tools. to see what has been learnt. Information should be Gamification is defined as taking the essence of chunked into smaller pieces of learning, and spacing game-attributes, such as engagement, transparency, out learning sessions has been shown to have lasting design and competition, and applying them to a benefits on long-term information recall (with a 2014 range of real-world processes inside an organisation, review led by Josh Davis, Director of Research and lead for example leadership development. Deloitte have
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Parvin Begum is an occupational psychologist in training working in the insurance sector parvinali@ hotmail.com
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professor for the NeuroLeadership Institute, ‘Keep an eye on the time’, suggesting that a 12-hour gap that includes sleep is particularly effective). Further research needs to be conducted in this area to explore how humans learn in digital environments. There is no longer heavy reliance on the authoritybased lecture mode, rather interaction and acquisition of knowledge are increasingly impersonal. Some of the major learning theories (behaviourism, cognitivism and constructivism) do not take into account how learning occurs via the medium of the web and with less reliance on authority-based teaching. We now
use more abstract, textual, visual, musical, social and kinaesthetic intelligence, and this will impact the way humans naturally learn. In a world where organisations are continuing to develop talent and drive performance, initiatives that tap into how humans learn will benefit them greatly. Occupational psychologists can help by understanding how learners engage and learn in different digital environments, which in turn will influence the design and delivery principles of digital content learning. Old learning frameworks and their theories will need to be redefined for this new digital era.
Re-enabling the neurodiverse? As automation replaces people with robots it may well be people with special abilities that can properly realise their value in the workplace; Sarah Cleaver and Nancy Doyle consider the implications for the ‘neurodiverse’
Sarah Cleaver is a Chartered Psychologist in private practice sarah@honest psychology.com
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Nancy Doyle is Managing Director of Genius Within CIC and founder of the BPS Neurodiversity and Employment Working Group nancy@ geniuswithin.org
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In short, we will be creating conditions for The scenario is familiar. Low-skilled jobs have neurodiverse people to come into their own. What are been replaced by shiny bots and flying drones. Even the strengths that neurodiverse people often have that some ‘white-collar’ jobs have begun to be replaced could be more valued in future workplaces? We now by computers endowed with ‘machine learning’ – turn to just a few examples. using sophisticated algorithms to work out what to Beta testing software needs someone with powers do, rather than needing to be pre-programmed (see of concentration and a literal mind; someone who can Martin Ford’s 2015 book The Rise of the Robots). But concentrate well and (preferably) who doesn’t need the consequences are startling: a ‘hollowed out middle social distractions. An autistic person might fit the class’ – with workers using high-end judgement-based skills (and the trust-fund wealthy elite) separated from bill nicely (did you see the example of this on BBC Two’s documentary Employable Me recently?) One a poorer low-skilled underclass. With fewer people employer, quoted in Thomas Armstrong’s 2010 book able to buy the products and services, the assumptions Neurodiversity, found their fault rate dropped from 5 underlying monetary systems will be shaken, unless radical new thinking gains ground. Coming soon to an per cent to 0.5 per cent when these tasks were given to autistic employees. economy near you! Creative energy often characterises those with If this scenario, or a version of it, is anywhere near attention deficit hyperactivity correct, we can think about two disorder. (Perhaps in this working important themes. Firstly, the skills “We need more research future, these individuals might to be valued will be those that can’t be labelled ‘creative energetics’ be replaced by computers. Instead, into the effectiveness of instead of ADHD?) Useful in we’ll need ‘genius’ thinkers – those reasonable adjustments, work environments where ideas that can make connections, see such as technology, are prized, these individuals things in new ways, and visualise could make future inventors, the import of available information sensory-overload entrepreneurs, entertainers, (see creativity expert Michael management and flexible advertising specialists, architects… Michalko’s 2007 article ‘How working practices, so that Some of these roles have also been geniuses think’). Secondly, at the shown to favour dyslexic thinkers; same time, technology will make we can give evidencetheir visual thinking allows new many tasks – writing reports, say, based recommendations possibilities and solutions to be or finding information when it’s to employers” worked through. Many successful needed – so much easier. Modern business people such as Sir Richard software is able to turn speech into Branson, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Sir text and commands much more Alan Sugar and (Lord) Richard Rogers have spoken out fluently than before. Words can be read from about dyslexic talents. the screen – and even from photographs – to allow Research from Julie Logan at the Cass Business those who struggle with reading to take in information School, published in 2009, discovered that whilst more easily.
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the psychologist november 2017 changing workplace
the prevalence in the general population of dyslexia is around 10 per cent, only 1 per cent of corporate managers are dyslexic, compared with 20 per cent of UK entrepreneurs and 35 per cent of US entrepreneurs. Companies such as Ernst and Young have hence devised a specific mentoring programme to support dyslexic recruits through the lower rungs of the corporate ladder, such that they might survive to the top, to diversify leadership thinking and avoid strategic ‘groupthink’. Making the most of these talents does rest on some assumptions. The people around those with neurodiverse talents must know, and understand, the differences. Tasks that are not suited to the ability profile may need to be allocated unevenly across a team (such as taking minutes – difficult for a dyslexic thinker because of their difficulties with working memory). We need to get better at matching roles – or tasks – to those abilities: for example, the high state of alertness that gives neurodiverse force/services staff ‘ground force awareness’, is a serious concentration inhibitor in an open-plan office. (See Eide and Eide’s 2011 book The Dyslexic Advantage for a useful discussion of dyslexic strengths and matching these to workplaces; they are numerous and relate to roles as diverse as teacher and architect, depending on the individual’s unique style and profile. Also of value is
Dr Thomas Armstrong’s book Neurodiversity, which covers a wide range of conditions and their potential evolutionary benefit to human societies.) As psychologists, we have a role to play in this (and it’s a role some of us are already taking on). We need to understand neurodiversity, and research this area to provide solid evidence of the talents; and we need to educate ‘the public’ to understand neurodiversity too. We need to report on strengths, as well as struggles, during cognitive assessments, and make sure these are understood in a career context rather than as pseudo-medical deficits (a point considered in McLoughlin and Doyle’s 2017 British Psychological Society report Psychological Assessment of Adults with Specific Performance Difficulties at Work). We need more research into the effectiveness of reasonable adjustments, such as technology, sensory-overload management and flexible working practices, so that we can give evidence-based recommendations to employers. We need to ensure our policymakers not only understand it, but actively intervene to help this group use their talents in the workplace. We need to help the neurodiverse understand their talent areas, and we need to help employers to make their workplaces non-disabling, talent-valuing places for the neurodiverse to shine. Our economy needs nothing less.
Going green at work Jan Maskell, convenor of the British Psychological Society’s Going Green Working Group Unless new business models are developed, we are heading for an increasingly unstable and unsustainable world. One way of adapting is to advocate and promote behavioural change models aimed at individuals and organisations. A second is for occupational psychologists to advocate and help develop competencies and resilience needed to cope with change. Work exists in organisations that operate in an ever-changing environment of politics and the law; a global economy; social and demographic changes; technological advances; and our physical environment. The current forecasts that will impact on organisations and individuals include a world population of 9.7bn by 2050; an average global temperature rise of between 1.5 and 6ºC by the end of the century; and freshwater consumption to rise by 25 per cent by 2025, with two thirds of the world’s inhabitants living in waterstressed countries. In 2014 the Global Footprint Network estimated that if everyone in the world were to consume natural resources in the same way as an average European, we would need three planets to sustain our current consumption levels. These are global impacts and will be felt locally
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in the supply chains of all organisations. To achieve sustainability at work, they need to respond in ways that mitigate, adapt and enable them to remain resilient in times of change. In the words of the British Standards Institution, they must display the ability to ‘anticipate, prepare for, and respond and adapt to incremental change and sudden disruptions in order to survive and prosper’. Corporate sustainability requires businesses to design strategies that not only focus on maintaining their financial status but also generate returns for society and the environment. Making a profit at the expense of our environment or people will no longer be tenable. New business models are being developed to ensure the long-term efficient use of resources and energy. This can be seen in the current successful mitigation activities of divestment and reinvestment from fossil fuels to renewable energy by pension funds, which can be both an organisational and a personal action. Susan Michie’s COM-B model of behaviour change, used in organisations such as the NHS, identifies the capability, opportunity, motivation and behaviours necessary for change. Currently this approach to interventions is leading to waste
Dr Jan Maskell is a Consultant Business Psychologist, and Associate Lecturer at Lancaster University jnmskll@gmail. com
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reduction and energy savings in a range of retail and manufacturing companies. The move from a linear ‘take-make-dispose’ economy is under way. A circular economy (for example, see www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/ publications) focuses on careful management of material flows through product design, reverse logistics, business model innovation and cross-sector collaboration. Organisations will need to increasingly employ the following principles: • Circular supply – where scarce resources are replaced with fully renewable, recyclable or biodegradable resource inputs. • Resource recovery – where waste materials are reprocessed into new resources. • Product life extension – where material that would otherwise be wasted is maintained or improved through remanufacturing or repair. • Sharing platforms – sharing products and assets with low ownership or use rate. • Product as a service – customers use products through a lease or pay-for-use arrangement. As individuals, we already use some of these daily – such as car share schemes and Airbnb. At work we
could seek more ways to share resources to become more efficient – with additional social and wellbeing benefits as we collaborate more with our colleagues with opportunities for learning from, in Etienne Wenger’s words, ‘action and connection’. Organisations may also have to adapt to changing conditions, or the threat of them. More extreme weather conditions and changing from a fossil fuel economy will create global risks with local effects. Employees will be expected to have the personal resilience to adapt to new ways of working – combinations of new goals, systems and processes. Helping individuals develop their resilience with a sense of purpose, competence, adaptability and social support is one way that psychologists can help to successfully implement these changes. An example of this is from an intervention for part of the NHS delivered by Robertson Cooper using their ‘I-resilience’ model. Using pre- and post-measures, perceptions of workplace pressures were found to have all improved significantly along with general levels of resilience. It is anticipated that over a longer period of time, the impact on wellbeing will also improve as employees get used to a more resilient way of dealing with workplace pressures.
Wellbeing Sharon De Mascia, Karen Royle and Tim Marsh on the increasing realisation that occupational health involves more than just health and safety
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The employment environment is constantly changing in every possible way, and yet workers face many of the same problems that challenged their equivalents in the middle of the 20th century. Economic factors are an ever-present: when it comes to wellbeing in the workplace, we know what we should and could do, but the financial bottom line often eats away at best practice. It could seem that society takes one step forward, two steps back. So how can psychologists make their voices heard? When it comes to supporting people with health problems, people turn to the health professionals; in psychology terms this might be a clinical, neuro- or health psychologist. Yet occupational psychologists are more likely to be involved in designing healthy places to work, or executive coaching to help managers build resilience and manage stress at work. Equally, times are changing. In years to come, we predict there will be less of a divide between managing health at home and managing health at work. There are many new schemes appearing that promote and support a healthy working nation, alongside research that shows the negative effects on mood of being out of work. There’s a strong drive to encourage people to return to work as soon as possible after ill health.
There is much more we could be doing to support both employers and employees here: a report published by the Council for Work and Health discusses the need for more psychologists from all domains to be involved in the occupational health arena (tinyurl.com/ y7ravvz3). Within the British Psychological Society, the Division of Occupational Psychology’s Psychology of Health & Well-Being Working Group will be working closely with the new cross-divisional BPS Work and Health Group. So, what are the main issues around wellbeing that will face us in the changing workplace? Changes in legislation around retirement age and the timing in relation to the career stage of ‘baby boomers’ (people born between the years 1946 and 1964), presents businesses with the challenge of meeting the demands of people with very different values, expectations and needs when it comes to managing their life goals and pressures. It is anticipated that by 2025, 75 per cent of the workforce will be Millennials (people reaching young adulthood around the year 2000: tinyurl.com/ydxq63pm) and Barbara Eversole and others have written about the need to create a flexible organisational culture to attract and retain talented workers across generations. The increasing state pension age will also result in
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the psychologist november 2017 changing workplace
an ageing workforce, who are increasingly likely to want to work flexibly towards retirement (see tinyurl. com/y7ggd3w8), and an ageing population is likely to place additional caring requirements upon workers with elderly relatives. Combined with the childcare responsibilities of working parents, this represents increasing demands outside of work that may impact a higher proportion of the workforce, which has implications for managing wellbeing. The changing generational profile of the workplace may also suggest a growing need for a different psychological contract. Lauren Lee Anderson has written about how Millennials value autonomy and independence at work, which is often reflected in a desire to work outside of typical office hours, in contrast to the desire for security and structure of older workers (tinyurl.com/y9hfw6jt). As ‘digital natives’, they are used to staying connected to the world through social media on smartphones and tablets at any time or place. Writing in the Journal of Management Psychology in 2008, Lucy Cennamo and Dianne Gardner discussed these generational differences in work values, outcomes and person-organisation values fit: the question of how employers can create a psychological contract that reflects Millennials’ preferences for freedom, status and social involvement remains a pressing one. Coming up behind the Millennials are ‘Generation Z’, born from the late 1990s onwards. They are reported to differ from Millennials by showing more interest in volunteering and making an impact on the world (see tinyurl.com/hvkrr5m). Organisations will need to find ways for employees to demonstrate these values within the workplace, if they are to attract and retain young talent, whilst maintaining their engagement and wellbeing. As well as changes to the workforce, there have been recognised changes in the macro-environment
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that have created a complex landscape for businesses, with barriers to positive wellbeing. Enhanced technology and social media allow connectivity regardless of location and time zone, giving workers continued access when working remotely or even when engaged in non-work activities, therefore allowing work and life to become ‘enmeshed’. He Lu Calvin Ong and Senthu Jeyaraj have discussed the differences between work–life balance and work–life harmony in this respect, the latter visualising work and life roles as being interconnected and dependent on each other, rather than separate and in competition. There’s one final area we would like to highlight: health and safety in the workplace, where occupational psychology has been hugely influential. If one single issue underpins the UK’s dominant position in the world of health and safety it is that, based on the core tenet of the Health and Safety at Work Act, it focuses on the objective and dynamic assessment of risk rather than a ‘compliance to avoid litigation’ model seen elsewhere around the world. This is underpinned by a proactive prediction of where things are likely to go awry. The field quickly embraced the world of occupational psychology in seeking to understand the person–environment interface and the 1001 ways it can go wrong! Safety leadership courses often start with the ‘fundamental attribution error’ (that we systemically give too much weight to individuals and not enough to environments when things go wrong). Based on Manchester psychologist Jim Reason’s ‘Just Culture’ model, systematic analysis can show how subtle cues and signals influence the workforce perception of what management really want, and hence their behaviour. Advanced influencing skills (see Robert Cialdini’s work), behavioural economics (the ‘nudge’ concepts of Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler), problem-solving in teams, communication skills and even transactional analysis come into play. In short, it’s often said that ‘compliance is but base one’ – occupational psychologists are heavily involved in all bases on from there. (An illustration: Jim Reason is widely agreed to be the world’s most influential safety writer.) The big challenge is to ‘thought lead’ around the world and bring other nations up to speed in the safety arena, and also to apply the learning to mental health and occupational illness. For every person killed in an accident in the UK, 50 working people will kill themselves and 120 will die of illness due to exposure at work. Psychology must contribute to discussions around the interconnected issues of productivity, misery, wellbeing and motivation.
Sharon De Mascia is Director, Cognoscenti Business Psychologists Ltd sharon@ cognoscenti. uk.com
Karen Royle is a Chartered Psychologist with Ways to Work karenroyle@ waystowork. co.uk
Dr Tim Marsh is a Chartered Psychologist and Chairman of RyderMarsh Sharman timmarshr@ rydermarsh. co.uk
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The future of careers Andrew James Clements charts how the rise of the ‘gig economy’ and more career changes have shadowed a general shift in the responsibility for managing careers from the organisation to the individual
Dr Andrew Clements is Lecturer in Organisational Psychology, School of Psychology, University of Bedfordshire Andrew. Clements@beds. ac.uk
The labour market we face today is challenging to navigate, as a consequence of being less structured and more flexible. Vicki Smith and others have written about how this ‘turbulent unpredictability’ tends to favour organisations, while not necessarily suiting the needs of individual workers. The ‘boundaryless career’, in Michael Arthur and Denise Rousseau’s terms, in which individuals must take responsibility for managing their career (e.g. keeping skills up to date, planning career progression, identifying opportunities) is often described in terms of individuals escaping the restrictions (e.g. on careers) of organisations. Yet critical voices (for example Kerr Inkson and colleagues) have observed that there are often contextual constraints that may present barriers to career success for marginalised workers, such as women, ethnic minorities and those in low-skilled jobs. So while the flexible job market is good for organisations, and for those who are able to progress from one opportunity to the next, others will be left with unemployment, underemployment and precarious employment. It should be noted that while the boundaryless career is sometimes assumed to be the new default career model, Ricardo Rodrigues and David Guest have suggested there is poor evidence for the end of traditional organisational careers. We cannot assume that career progression strategies will be the same for everyone, and we need to be aware of the context surrounding the sectors in which people work. I will, however, focus on discussing the more precarious employment future facing many, and the implications of this for psychological practice. Getty Images
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It is often assumed that job security does not rest within a single organisation (which may terminate employment to reduce costs, or may face unexpected catastrophe), but with an individual’s ability to adapt to market conditions, such as by being able to seek reemployment, or transitioning between organisations, job sectors or nations. ‘Career adaptability’ has become a key concept, particularly in the work of Hirschi et al. Thus attention has shifted from employment to employability, which Andrew Rothwell and John Arnold have defined as the ability to gain and maintain desired forms of employment, and others consider a set of understandings and experiences that enhance career success. Vicki Smith has identified a number of strategies that individuals may use to enhance their employability: engaging in unpaid (i.e. volunteering) or poorly paid work to gain experience, training and networking to build human and social capital, and engaging in ‘identity work’ in order to develop professional values and behaviours that will be recognised by employers. This raises some ethical issues: the frequent advice to engage in unpaid work may unintentionally exploit the labour of individuals with precarious careers, but may also exclude marginalised groups (e.g. working-class individuals) who cannot afford to engage in unpaid work. Furthermore, as the responsibility for career management shifts to individuals, so too can the costs for developing the skills that organisations wish to acquire. In a 2012 review Michael Tomlinson outlined how higher education (HE) has been increasingly treated as a method for improving the employability of individuals. However, with growing numbers of graduates, a degree is no longer a simple passport to career success. At the same time as demand for HE has become nearly universal, governments are typically requiring individuals to contribute more to the cost of their education. In other words, students are paying more for education that is often assumed to be a route to career success, whilst the ability of HE to facilitate this success is becoming more fraught. There are concerns that this emphasis on employability may negatively shape students’ focus on particular aspects of their learning away from critical understanding or the development of prosocial values. There may also be a discrepancy between what employers say they want from graduates and what they claim to actually get. There are a number of ways that psychologists may get involved in helping individuals who are navigating this precarious labour market. There is evidence, from Nele de Cuyper and colleagues, that perceptions of job insecurity impact individuals’ beliefs about their
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employability, so coaches and counsellors may have a role to play in helping individuals to build a more positive view of themselves. And this has positive impacts for the employers as well: Gail Kinman’s work has suggested that interventions to help build psychological resources such as resilience improve the psychological wellbeing of individuals, but Jessica van Wingerden and her team have found that they improve performance at work too. General career support is likely to help individuals, but Lyndsey Jenkins and Debora Jeske have found that when this is combined with other forms of support (emotional, instrumental and informational) individuals experience a greater sense of their agency in relation to careers and are more engaged with identifying their career interests and choices by interacting with others. Psychologists may also have a role to play in helping individuals to identify the values that they wish to fulfil through work. This might help counter the risk of focusing on instrumental behaviours while
developing employability; but focusing on values might also have benefits for employability in itself. Longitudinal research led by Lea Waters has suggested that individuals who are self-directed and value-driven in their career decisions are likely to put more effort into their job search behaviours and are therefore more likely to succeed in reemployment. We can also ask people to imagine successful future versions of themselves at work: a 2012 paper in Journal of Applied Psychology led by Karoline Strauss found that this may promote proactive career behaviour, and thus increase employability. There is therefore a lot that we can do to help individuals navigate the changing world of work. However, given some of the issues we’ve noted, perhaps we should also be asking ourselves whether it is time to resist emerging developments in the labour market? Encouraging a focus on values may be a crucial component of helping individuals in an ethical manner.
The present and future of flexible and agile work
The knowledge, skills and behaviours that help us meet the challenges of the 21st-century workplace are very different to those required in more ‘traditional’ types of work. We need to be able to work independently and without direct supervision, and to work remotely and flexibly as required. We also need to manage technology, not only for communication purposes but also to help us self-organise our diaries and workloads. Occupational psychologists have a major role to play in helping individuals and organisations develop the flexibility and readiness for change needed to thrive in such a dynamic working environment. From 2014 all UK employees who had worked for their employer for at least 26 weeks became eligible to request flexible working arrangements. Employers are required to consider requests, but can refuse for valid business reasons. Great claims are made for the benefits of flexible working for productivity, wellbeing and work–life balance. Remote working can also aid the green agenda by reducing the need for commuting, and there can be substantial savings on office rent and energy costs. Nonetheless, in terms of the effects on employees, systematic reviews have concluded that any gains from flexible working are modest at best. Indeed, under some conditions, it can intensify stress and increase rather than reduce conflict between work and personal life (see reviews by Kerry Joyce, Clare Bambra and others). It is therefore vital for organisations to be aware of the risks of ‘imposing’ remote working
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Gail Kinman and Almuth McDowall describe how an emphasis on task- and project-based work, together with increased independence and flexibility, is bringing challenges for work–life balance
on their employees: choice and control over flexible working options, and support when jobs are redesigned and reconfigured, are vital. Technology can improve work–life balance by allowing people to manage the competing demands of their work and home roles more effectively. As with flexible working, however, there is an increasing recognition that ICT use can threaten as well as
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enhance employee wellbeing. Being ‘always on’ can extend working hours by making the job role more salient – this limits opportunities to recover from work, with serious implications for productivity and personal relationships. At present most organisations only provide their remote workers with general health and safety guidance, and they are forced to self-manage their ICT use. Many struggle to set limits on their use of technology and feel overwhelmed by the volume of email traffic and the expectations of a rapid response. Dr Gail Kinman There is surprisingly little guidance available is Professor of on how to help people engage with technology in Occupational a way that protects their wellbeing and boosts their Health productivity. A key role for psychologists is to raise Psychology, and awareness of the need to help employees manage ICT Director of the use and help them develop strategies to accomplish Research Centre this. Members of the BPS Division of Occupational for Applied Psychology Working Group have recently developed Psychology, the concept of ‘e-resilience’, referring to the behaviours University of and environmental interactions that help people Bedfordshire engage with ICT in a healthy and sustainable way. Gail.Kinman@ Our work has highlighted the importance of individual beds.ac.uk differences in determining what is ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ engagement with technology. An important aspect of e-resilience is also a recognition of the need for ‘email and e-communications etiquette’ where employees respect the practices and preferences of colleagues. Building e-resilience in the workforce should be considered a priority by 21st-century organisations. There is no simple solution. ‘Email-free’ days, one day a week when employees are able to talk to each other only face-to-face or on the phone, are increasingly Dr Almuth popular. There is evidence that physiological markers McDowall is of stress are reduced and the quality of working Lecturer in relationships improved on such days. Nonetheless, Organisational such measures can be tokenistic, as the rest of the week Psychology, remains stressful and people may struggle to catch up Birkbeck, with their email backlog. Other organisations have University of banned email outside formal working hours or during London holiday periods. Although effective in some working a.mcdowall@ environments, such sweeping measures are likely to be bbk.ac.uk resisted by employees who wish to control their own working patterns and who prefer more integration between their work and personal life. Restricting email use is also likely to disadvantage people who are juggling work and family responsibilities as well as those working across time zones. Nonetheless, there is strong evidence that some disengagement from ICT benefits On our website wellbeing, job performance and personal relationships. People are also becoming more Did our 2010 assessment of aware of the risks of being ‘always occupational psychology in on’. Recent research conducted a changing world stand the by Ofcom shows that many of us test of time? See tinyurl.com/ are taking a digital detox – a selfoccpsy2010 imposed break from technology in Also see the online version of order to refresh our physical, mental this piece for references. and social resources.
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So who is responsible for helping people achieve a healthy balance between their work and personal life? Rather worryingly, research suggests that the proportion of managers who believe that work–life balance is a ‘private concern’ has grown significantly over the last 10 years. Many organisations are also reluctant to acknowledge the adverse effects of long working hours on the health and productivity of their staff. It is also vital to help organisations pre-empt unintended consequences of any intervention they introduce. Remote working, for example, may reduce organisational costs and remove the stress of commuting, but can lead to social isolation and role stress. There is also evidence that flexible working for family reasons can be stigmatised. Men, in particular, are widely considered to be less committed to their job and less worthy of promotion if they work flexibly – this has recently been termed the ‘price of love’ by Caroline Gattrell and Cary Cooper. Recent studies show that women as well as men, and younger as well as older workers, share these attitudes. We can help organisations manage these risks, reduce the stigma of flexible working and help managers develop the skills required to support remote workers. A ‘virtual coffee machine’, for example, can help e-workers maintain social relationships with colleagues and reduce feelings of isolation. On the plus side, organisations are increasingly aware of the need to protect the wellbeing of their staff and improve satisfaction and retention. Occupational psychologists are well placed to help them find evidence-based, tailored and sustainable solutions rather than rely on simplistic ‘one size fits all’ interventions. The pace of technological change and the rise of the ‘gig economy’ mean that more and more people will need to self-manage their working lives. The opportunities provided by technology will undoubtedly increase, but it is still crucial to safeguard the wellbeing of the human element. As a fellow researcher commented a while ago, ‘You can build an app for most things, but you can’t build an app for managing and working with people.’ In order to thrive in the face of rapid change, we need to anticipate what work will look like in the future and how it will be organised. We must appreciate the benefits and drawbacks of technology and learn to anticipate change. ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’ (advancement through technology) was the catchphrase of a famous Audi advert. This term seems particularly appropriate now, as we increasingly need people to work with technology to achieve truly flexible and beneficial work practices, rather than be governed by it.
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NottiNgham 2018
The British Psychological Society’s Annual Conference East Midlands Conference Centre, Nottingham 2–4 May Submissions deadline 2 November 2017 Confirmed Keynotes Professor John Antonakis, University of Lausanne Professor Brian Nosek, Centre for Open Science Professor Cathy Creswell, University of Reading Delegate highlights from 2017 ‘The annual conference provides a wonderful opportunity to listen to keynote speakers, academics and practitioners on a wide range of topics. There is always something for everyone and the venues provide spaces to network, meet friends and meet the exhibitors.’ ‘Annual Conference is brilliant for cross divisional learning, networking and fun. Some amazing keynotes and a very engaging, relevant programme. Above all, fun!’ ‘The annual conference continues to be an excellent flagship event of which the BPS can be rightly proud.’
Follow us @BPSConferences using #bpsconf. Credit: John Wright, johnwrightart.blogspot.co.uk
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09/10/2017 12:51
The rules of unruliness At the Latitude Festival in Suffolk this July, our editor Dr Jon Sutton introduced Professor Stephen D. Reicher in the Wellcome Trust Arena. This is an edited transcript. Many of the classic psychological studies serve to keep us in our place. They tells us that we’re inherently unequal, that we’re born to be greedy, selfish and competitive, and that we’re naturally conformist. We just have to accept the status quo, resistance is futile. Yet, if you look closely, the claims fall apart. In particular, inspection of classic studies of conformity actually show us that resistance is rife. So when do people adapt to the world as it is, and when do they band together in revolution? What are the rules of unruliness? Can they help us to create a more disorderly world?
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want to start off optimistically. In this beautiful wood, in these beautiful surroundings, on this beautiful day, it would be churlish not to agree with Louis Armstrong that we live in a wonderful world. We have the knowledge of the ages, the wisdom of all the great libraries, available on the phones in our pockets – possibly even the watches on our wrists. We are able to suck energy from the sun, the wind and the waters. We can now image what’s going on in your head, even as you’re thinking. We can map your genome. We can not only cure your diseases, we can predict your diseases so as to prevent them. We have enough productivity and enough wealth in this world to make sure that every single human being lives a fulfilling life. And yet, of course, many don’t. Because while we live in the best of worlds, we manage to change it into the worst of worlds. Just eight people – eight men, actually – have as much wealth as the poorest 50 per cent of people on earth. That’s 3.7 billion people. There’s enough wealth for everyone, but not everyone has wealth. Every three seconds, a child dies of a preventable cause in this world, much of it to do with malnutrition. Every 10 seconds a child dies of malnutrition at the same time as there is enough food on earth to feed everybody; at the same time as the average British family throws out the equivalent of 24 meals a month. Now, it is wrong to suggest that the world is poor and Britain is rich, because, as you know, there are divisions within as well as between countries. And so to use an example that’s in all our minds, and I think all our hearts – the average flat in Kensington and Chelsea costs £1.4 million. The average terraced house in Kensington and Chelsea costs £4.2 million. The average semi-detached house in Kensington and Chelsea costs £6.1 million. And yet at the same time we are told that the council cannot afford to spend £1000 per flat to put sprinklers in high-rise buildings. At the same time as Kensington and Chelsea uses its £245 million reserves to reduce the tax burden on those poor souls who live in £6.1 million houses. We live in an absurd world, we live in a mad world. If the proverbial anthropologist from Mars was to come down to our planet, she would say, ‘This is so profoundly wrong that there’s no room for discussion.’ And she would look at us and ask, ‘Why are you not permanently outraged? Why are you not angry? Why are you not doing something about this state of affairs’? ‘Surely’, she would say, ‘you would change things if you could.’ And there’s the rub. If you could. No one can deny the inequalities. No one can deny the figures. They’re not false news. No one would even pretend that they are. They are stark realities. They cannot be denied. So how do we live with this inequality? Partly, I suspect, it’s simply familiarity. We forget about it. We get on with our lives. We allow things to happen. We do nothing, and it goes on. But partly, there’s an industry devoted to legitimating inequality, devoted to telling us ‘No you can’t’ do anything about it. This industry tells us that perhaps the world isn’t perfect, but we live in the best of all possible worlds. And that industry is called academia. We have recently been outraged by the fact that the likes of Michael Gove and Boris Johnson tell academics that they are part of the elite
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the psychologist november 2017 latitude festival Stefano Cagnoni/reportdigital.co.uk
establishment. Now, it is true that for Gove and Johnson to argue against elitism is a bit like Gary Glitter arguing for child welfare, but, nonetheless, they do have a point. Because our academies are institutions. We are funded by governments, and, historically, every time you find inequality, you find the intelligentsia at the core of it. You find the universities at the core of it. There is a debate, for instance, about the relationship between education and racism. It is argued that racism is ignorance, and the ignorant are racist. But if you look at the most hideous, racist regimes – in pre-war Romania, in Nazi Germany – it is always the intelligentsia that are at the core of them. There is an industry, an academic industry devoted to telling us: ‘No, you can’t.’ That inequality is our lot, and we have to get on with it. Forget about it. Ignore it. And at the core of that industry is my own discipline, psychology. And that’s why I became involved in psychology. Because every time I found myself arguing about the obscenities of our unequal world, people would say,
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‘Human nature. People are like that. We have to live in a competitive world, because people are naturally competitive. We have to live in an unequal world because some people are clever and some people are less clever.’ If you look at the history of IQ research, there were people arguing in the 1920s, and still today, that there’s no point giving the same to everyone, because the likes of you and me can appreciate it, but the likes of them, they would spoil it. They couldn’t appreciate it. They don’t have the sensibilities that we have. They don’t have the abilities that we have. Women, black people, whatever, particular groups lack the abilities to appreciate wealth or to do the work to earn it. There is a variant on this, a popular variant. You will see it everywhere. It’s said casually. It’s said that people are so flawed, the human psyche is so inadequate, that we have to distort information in order to cope with our world. We are full of biases. We are full of little devices to help us cope with the complexity of the world. But it comes with costs,
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inevitable costs. We can’t estimate probabilities. We can’t deal with complexities. We have to leave it to our betters to rule us. There are so many ways in which my discipline tells you that you have to stay in your place. You have to live in an unequal world. My own work centres on one aspect of this argument. It’s not the argument about inequality, it’s the argument about challenging inequality. Because if you are poor, or if you are oppressed or if you are weak, you only have one resource on your side. You don’t have control of the media. You don’t have control over employment. You don’t have technologies on your side. What you have are your numbers. It is the basic slogan of all trade unionism: the power of the powerless lies in their combination. It is when people get together they are powerful. And so the powerful always fear combination. They always seek to isolate people. They always seek to divide people. They always seek to individualise people. There is, for instance, a wonderful book, a horrifying book, by a man called Sofsky, The Order of Terror. He is looking at the Nazi death camps. These death camps brought people together, they concentrated people, they brought thousands, and indeed millions of people squeezed together in camps The Nazis could only make this work if they made sure that people did not come together psychologically as a group – that they looked past each other, that they remained atomised. Control depends on atomising people. Domination depends upon stopping us from coming together as members of groups to challenge the inequality of our world. So, there’s a huge industry in psychology, which tells us we are natural conformists. We are born to obey orders. We are born to obey rules. Some of our work has sought to challenge that. To show that actually, no, people are not designed to obey orders. Actually, if you give people orders, they will react against them in order to claim their freedom. Seduction is more powerful than coercion. More basically still, in our discipline and in our society – these things are important not because they exist in academic journals that two or three people read, but in the everyday world beyond – there is a notion that groups are bad for you. That alone, you’re a rational individual. Alone, you think sensibly. But if you are put in a group you lose your rationality. You lose your morality. You lose your agency. You become like a zombie. We are told: ‘Just say no to groups.’ Groups make you take drugs. Groups make you drink alcohol. Groups make you riot and kill people. Groups are bad for you. It’s everywhere. It’s everywhere in our culture. A week doesn’t go by that I don’t get some journalist phoning up and asking me to explain mob behaviour. Mob is not an explanation. Mob is a pejorative. Mob is a way of disqualifying the mass. In fact, if you look at this psychology, it grew up at the end of the 19th century. Specifically in France, because the social order was very weak, and feared the mass. The Third Republic was born out of the Paris Commune, where
the masses had come together and had taken power. And when the Commune was defeated, elite fears of the mass formed into a group psychology, a crowd psychology, which told us that when we get together in a crowd, we become submerged. We lose our conscious personalities. We lose our capacity to judge. And because we become submerged, we stop thinking. We just go along with any passing ideas: so-called ‘contagion’. We become capable of things we’re never normally capable of. It was explicitly in the context of trying to stabilise the regime against mass challenges that my discipline came into being and that these ideas of the group came into being. This science is deeply, and profoundly, politicised. ‘I love being in crowds’ Now, I came to university in 1975 thinking (probably like many of you) that it would be an intellectual place where you would sit in corners, intensely talking about things that matter – about philosophy, about politics. But I found that, on the whole, you got drunk and didn’t think about very much at all. And in my first year at university we had an occupation… it was a time when these things still went on. The occupation was about trying to get a nursery. It was about access, about women’s access, about providing childcare for women who otherwise would be excluded. And being a nice, middle-class boy, I was afraid of occupations, but I went into it. And in that occupation, I found that in the crowd, in the mass, people were staying up until three, four in the morning discussing strategy and principles: how we make the university more open, more accountable. At last, I found that intellectual thrill I had been looking for in collectivity. But as that was happening two other things were going on. First of all, I was listening to my first-year social psychology lectures, telling me that groups were bad for me. Secondly, I went to meetings where our vice chancellor used such a psychology to discredit what we were doing. He would say, ‘Ah, well, they’re just emotional. They’re just in a crowd. It’s just an explosion of affect. It’s really not the way to go forward.’ I saw, in practice, the purposes to which group psychology is put, and this made me passionate about my discipline. I discovered it wasn’t just an intellectual word game. It mattered. It affected people’s lives. It affected issues of equality, and opportunity. Over the years, over many years since 1975, I have studied groups and crowds. I do study other things, but I come back to collective psychology because I love being in crowds. So it is a pleasure to be at this festival today. In fact, I have students at the moment studying different types of festival. We’ve looked at religious festivals in India, we’ve looked at football fans, we’ve looked at music festivals as well. And in complete opposition to the mainstream ideology of groups, you find three things when you look at crowds. I’ll illustrate them, sometimes with my own work but sometimes from other work.
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the psychologist november 2017 latitude festival
If you wanted an example of the irrational group, the irrational crowd exploding with affect, well, you might think, the simplest of crowds surely is the food riot. People get hungry. People see food. They grab it and run off. Simple. Why do you need academics to explain it to you? Except that food riots aren’t like that. There is a wonderful study by the historian E.P. Thompson, which I’m sure many of you will know, on the moral economy of the crowd. He looks at some 700 food riots that happened in England between about 1780 and 1820. He shows first of all that these riots happened not when people were at their hungriest but when grain was beginning to go into the granaries, where the dearth was beginning to subside. They happened around specific moments where grain was transported out of the locality. The form they took was not a mad explosion. It involved peasants taking the grain, often leaving money and giving the grain sacks back to the merchants. Thompson argues that this reflects a popular ideology – what he calls a moral economy. This was a period of transition in Britain’s society, from feudal to market-based society; from a society based on the locality, to a society based on the market. For peasants, the locality was everything. So if there was no grain, well, people starved. But if there was grain, it was to be sold locally. For market ideology, of course, you take grain wherever you can make most money from it. Those two ideologies clashed when the grain was transported out of the area. The riots are an imposition of the peasants’ own view of how society should be organised. They are not an explosion, they are a way of affirming ‘our’ view of society over ‘theirs’. If even the food riot is not this mad explosion, but shows meaning, how much more is that true of other crowd and group events? The first thing that happens when people form a group is they stop thinking in terms of ‘I’, ‘my personal values’, ‘what makes me distinctive from another individual’. They start thinking ‘we’, they start thinking in terms of social identities, what we have in common that makes us different from other groups. And they start acting in terms of the norms, and the values, and the interests of that group. If you define yourself in terms of, say, of being a supporter of a football club, what matters is not what you do, but how the team does. If you define yourself in terms of nationality, what matters is not how you do, but how the nation does. In 1989, in Timisoara, in the uprising against the brutal Ceausescu regime, people literally opened their shirts and said, ‘Shoot me, kill me, there is no point being alive if I am not free, if we are not free.’ In other words, the future of the group, the desire for the nation to thrive is more important to people than their own individual lives. So the first thing that is happening in a group is not a loss of identity, a loss of rationality, it’s a shift – a shift so that we think in terms of the collective. We think in terms of the ‘we’. Our ideas shift from personal predilections to shared beliefs. Perhaps it is
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From the audience (more in the online version) Q: I keep thinking about online radicalisation, where a person is on their own, but yet they come to have an idea that they’re in a big group where they may or may not be. Do you think this is what’s going on during online radicalisation? Is the group still important? What can we do about it? SR: The mainstream notion of radicalisation is a group notion, but it’s wrong. Underlying the Prevent strategy, we’ve all heard about it, the notion that the way in which radicalisation happens is that somebody is vulnerable for one reason or another, it could be bullying, it could be the loss of a parent, it could be racism. That makes them vulnerable, creates a demand, and extremist groups supply the warmth and the connection and they just go along with anything. The problem with that analysis is that it doesn’t ask: why do people go along with those groups and not others? Why do they accept the ideas of these groups and not others? People in the area call it the problem of specificity – why, specifically, do they take on board the ideas of groups like ISIS? Our argument, to cut a long story very short, is that those ideas become powerful when they match lived experience. The fundamental rhetoric of ISIS and other groups is that there is a black and white division between Muslims and the rest. They will always be at war with each other, Muslims will always be humiliated in the West unless they come together and fight back. So anything which tells people ‘you don’t belong’, or ‘you’re excluded’, feeds into the credibility of that discourse, of that rhetoric. One of the aims of terrorist outrages by groups like ISIS is not so much to terrorise per se, but to provoke governments into reactions that cast all Muslims under suspicion. If we react in ways which say we’re slightly suspicious of you, which treat you differently when you go through security at airports, when you treat me slightly differently when you use the NHS or whatever, it begins to give credibility to that discourse. So that’s what I mean when I say that to understand groups, the warmth is one element, but you have to look at the ideas and ideologies and ask why they make sense to people. The biggest thing we must avoid doing is to help groups like ISIS by doing things that give credibility to their view of a world divided between Muslims and the rest. Every single hate crime against a Muslim is doing the best propaganda work for ISIS that can be done.
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only in the crowd, the great historian Georges Lefebvre once said, that we lose our petty day-to-day concerns and become the subjects of history. But it’s not just that we transform and align our ideas in the group or crowd. Another transformation takes place – and it’s a fundamental shift. It’s a shift of social relations. You see, one of the aspects of the human condition – and many authors have written about this, Camus and Sartre and others – is that sense of existential isolation, of division. Of not knowing how we relate to others or how others see the world. And it’s a profoundly troubling thing. If I say something to you, I don’t know whether you’ll agree with me and support me, or
Trumpeting the self ‘We look at Donald Trump and we see a man who calls Mexicans rapists, we see a man who boasts about his sexual assaults on women, we see a man who is so infantile in his insults that he boasts about the size of his genitalia in major political speeches. What on earth is the appeal of this man?’ In a joint British Academy and British Psychological Society public lecture Professor Stephen Reicher (University of St Andrews) tackled the question of how Donald Trump came to be in the White House. Our journalist Ella Rhodes was there. Reicher said the concept of the self was crucial to understanding Trump’s victory. While we usually see the self as involving individual thoughts, behaviour and values, the self is varied and is made up of the thoughts, values and beliefs of the various groups to which we belong. When we see ourselves as members of a given group we are changed, both in our thoughts and our behaviours, but group membership also empowers us to form a feeling of a collective self, being able to instantiate our norms, values and sense of the world. But why did people vote for Trump? While many deride his supporters as stupid or mad, focusing on the aspects of Trump that are most salient to us misses the point. Research suggests that Trump’s supporters are aware that he is racist and sexist… they voted for him not because of these things but in spite of them. It emerges that Trump supporters’ lived experience is one of decline, being left out, derided and ignored. Many feel powerless in the face of governments who seem to ignore the needs of the ‘ordinary’ person, and are confronted by narratives that look down on ordinary voters as ignorant hicks and hillbillies. Trump speaks to this notion of decline and articulates the lived experience of many people and explains it by blaming the other. ‘There was a very simple and very powerful construction of categories, an exclusionary notion of us, a derided us, an excluded us and an us in decline vs. the other.’ Trump’s authoritarianism is clear when we see how he represents difference or those who disagree with him. Trump scorns those who are against him as un-American or enemies of the people, while presenting himself as prototypical of the group. ‘The success of Trump might not be in intellectual brilliance but in performative brilliance and performative coherence. Our sneering will mean that we won’t understand what he did and will leave to him the tools of constructing social categories. We’ll leave the world-making tools in his hands.’ For more from this talk, see tinyurl.com/ReicherTrump or listen via tinyurl.com/babpssr 42
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whether you’ll look at me in amazement and think I’m a fool, or worse. We are divided from others and from the world. And yet when we have shared identity – when we are a ‘we’ – we start assuming that others have the same ideas as us, the same values as us, the same sensibilities as us. That is, the collective entails a transformation of social relations towards intimacy. There’s a lot of work on this. People trust and respect each other more in groups. They support each other. They help each other more in groups. When people are a ‘we’, they act together. They affirm each other. They validate each other’s views of the world. Let me give you two examples of this. One trivial, and one consequential. One of the things that keeps us apart is not just ideas, but our physicality. The fact that we are living bodies. Smelly, oozing, sweaty bodies. Disgust is the great social ordering emotion. And yet when people see each other as members of the same group, when you are not other, but you are part of ‘us’, people literally find a smelly t-shirt less disgusting. We lose disgust. In exactly the same way – and I speak as a father here – when I had my child, I thought: ‘Nappies.’ I thought: ‘Ugh, I’m going to have to shovel someone else’s shit.’ And then I realised that my son was not other, my son was part of me. And to wipe his bottom was no different and no more disgusting than wiping my own bottom. When we get rid of otherness, things are transformed. And now for a more consequential example. I said to you that when we see other people as part of a common group, we tend to support them and help them. And we have experiments, laboratory experiments, that show this. But at one point, we were trying to explain one of the greatest acts of solidarity – one of the few good-news stories to come out of the Holocaust. I mean the so-called miracle of Bulgaria, where not a single Jew was deported from the land of Old Bulgaria during the war. Twice the Nazis tried. Twice the Nazis failed because people mobilised against them. And we looked at that mobilisation. We looked at the arguments, and when you look closely, you find that the argument is fascinating. Because it rarely talks about Jews. It’s not that the Nazis are deporting ‘them’. They are deporting some of ‘us’. They are deporting a national minority. If there is mention of Jews, it’s to stress how Bulgarian they are. They have the same desires as us. They sing the same folk songs as us, they have the same heroes as us, and so on. Being part of ‘us’ can make the difference literally between life and death. So two transformations when we think of ourselves, together with others, as group members. First of all we think the same. We see the world in common terms. We agree on goals and priorities. Secondly, we work together, we align our efforts. You put those two things together, and you see that, in groups, we are empowered to reach our goals. In groups, we can make the world on our own terms. We call this collective self-realisation.
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empowering. Groups make us agents. Groups make In the group, we don’t live in a world imposed on us healthy. us by others. In the group, we live in a world that we I remember a number of years ago, I did a seminar make ourselves. This leads to great joy. That leads to on crowd behaviour at St Andrews, and I had told my the effervescence of which many people speak. Often students to experience what crowds are like. Go out. they think that this joy and passion of crowds is a Go into a crowd. And the students came back the next sign of lack of rationality. It is quite the opposite. It is week, in tears of joy. Now, I stress, if there are tears because, in crowds, the reason on which we act is ours in my seminars, they’re not normally tears of joy. So and not theirs that groups are passionate places. I said to them, ‘What’s going on?’ ‘It was wonderful,’ Remarkably passionate places. We work on they said. They’d gone to the G7 demonstration, the a festival in India, the month-long Magh Mela at Make Poverty History demonstration, that happened in Allahabad. Every year millions come. Every sixth year, tens of millions come. Every twelfth year at the Kumbh Edinburgh in 2005. They said, ‘For the first time in our lives, we were telling governments what to do.’ Mela, you’ve probably seen on it TV, up to 100 million So, what does all this mean in terms of the rules people come. And it’s so crowded that by all the of unruliness? Recall Jon Sutton’s introduction to evidence of traditional psychology it should be this talk. He recounted how once I said to him, a highly aversive place that turns you pathological. ‘Jon, the problem’s not that there are too many liberals It’s so loud – it’s louder than here! For a month, in psychology, it’s that there’s not people are exposed to noise levels enough socialists.’ For me, the that, according to World Health Organization guidelines, should “Groups in so many ways fundamental difference between liberalism and socialism is an cause you problems after 45 are fundamental to our attitude towards the group and minutes. As for the sanitation, individual wellbeing. the collective. For liberalism, well if you step in the Ganges, do not ask what is slopping past Groups are empowering. it’s the individual who matters, individual rationality that matters. your ankles, that’s my only advice. Groups make us agents. For socialism, it’s the collective And yet if you talk to people, they Groups make us healthy.” that matters. It’s not that socialists talk in terms of bliss. It’s a blissful are anti-individual. But they realise occasion, because they think that people can only be agents, together, they come together, and can only determine their own fate, when they come they can live as Hindus should. Not only that, despite together. Collectivity is fundamental to our agency, it all those factors I spoke about, if you measure their doesn’t take it away. wellbeing, it improves from a month at the Mela. And rationality also is much overplayed. Because Groups aren’t just good for you psychologically. They passion is equally important to agency. Passion don’t just bring you together. They don’t just empower doesn’t describe the world, it tells us what matters you. They give you a sense of mastery over the world. in the world. Reason without emotion is like having They take away stress. They improve your immune a powerful car without any sense of which direction function. They make your health better. you’d like to go in in it. Collectivity is critical if we want to get to our destination. So if I had to give you rules of unruliness, my first ‘Embrace the power of the group’ and simplest rule would be this: embrace the power of There is a whole movement, incidentally, that I’m sure the group. Don’t be afraid of groups. Come on in, the you’ll come across in the next few years. It is called The Social Cure. It shows that the most powerful thing water is lovely. Come on in, the group is affirming. The second rule I would give you is that the most in terms of improving health, are not drugs, not even revolutionary thing you can do is to reframe the way the diet. It is being a group member. For those of you in which we define ‘we’ and ‘they’ in our society. You who are around my age, if, on retiring, you lose two group memberships, there’s a 14 per cent chance you’ll see, there’s another simple truth, and that is that most societies are divided – and here I draw on nobody in be dead within two years of retiring. If, however, on particular – between the many and the few; between retiring you join two new groups, there’s a 0.5 per the people and the powerful, between those who cent chance that you will die. A 28-times difference. work and those who own the means of production. Or again, in terms of depression, if you are a member Most societies are fundamentally segmented, and of one social group, your chance of being depressed so there’s a real fear of democracy in most societies. reduces by 50 per cent – about 10 times as powerful Remember that the real meaning of democracy, demos as any drug you can imagine. What’s the best predictor and kratos, is the power of people, it’s not just voting, of recovery from coronary heart disease? Being a it’s the people being in control of their lives, not just member of groups. Now, the pharma industry won’t in the political sphere but the economic sphere and like it, because they won’t make a lot of money from social sphere as well, and to deflect democratic anger it and therefore it won’t be publicised, So we need to at inequality we are given all sorts of other divisions. publicise this ourselves. Groups in so many ways are Often that division is between ours as a nation and fundamental to our individual wellbeing. Groups are
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other nations, or divisions between the deserving and undeserving. The sign of a new politics is the emergence of a new sense of ‘we’ and ‘they’, and I think that is emerging since the election, and since Grenfell. Let me give you just one example of how the issue of ‘we’ and ‘they’ is fundamental to the way we see the world and the way we act in the world. Let me take the question of immigration. A while ago, we looked at the immigration speeches of all the major leaders before the 2015 election. From Farage to Miliband. And they all said, ‘We’ve got a problem of immigration. Immigration is a problem.’ But before I try to address that, let me look at the term ‘immigrant’. Why do we see people as immigrants? What is the implication of seeing them in these terms? First of all, an immigrant is ‘other’. An immigrant is defined in terms of ‘otherness’. They are a national ‘other’. An immigrant isn’t somebody who comes from another region: somebody who comes from the north to the south of England isn’t an immigrant. Somebody who comes from Norwich to Ipswich isn’t an immigrant. Somebody who goes from one suburb to another isn’t an immigrant. An immigrant is strictly defined in national terms, it presupposes a national category. The term ‘immigrant’ is ‘other’ to the nation. But more than this, an immigrant is ‘other’ to the very system of nations. Nationhood is about fixed identities, place identities; the immigrant is somebody who moves. And the most pathologised groups in our world of nations are those who are defined in terms of movement. The Jew, the wandering Jew. The gypsy, the wandering gypsy, and now, the immigrant. What is more, ‘immigrant’ has connotations of criminality, of threat, of dangerousness. So if I ask you, ‘Are you for or against immigrants?’, I’ve loaded the dice. Do you want somebody who is completely alien to you, who is
The Psychologist presents… A manifesto for psychological health and wellbeing Our second ‘The Psychologist presents…’ session in the Wellcome Trust Arena at Latitude Festival featured Professor Peter Kinderman and Professor Victoria Tischler in conversation with Dr Henrietta Bowden-Jones. Read the full transcript at https://thepsychologist. bps.org.uk/manifesto-psychological-health-and-wellbeing a podcast version is due in the new year. You can also find the transcripts from our 2015 and 2016 speakers – Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and Elizabeth Stokoe – on our website. 44
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threatening to you, who is probably criminal to you, is it surprising that a lot of people say no? But why do we see them in terms of immigration? Why don’t we see them in terms of mothers or fathers or families? When Alan Kurdi died, briefly we started seeing people as mothers, fathers, families, and things changed. Why don’t we see them in terms of these or other categories, say as fellow workers? The problem we have in this country is not an immigrant problem, it’s a problem of labour flow. If you bring people to a particular place – whether they come from the next suburb, the next town, the next region, or from a different country – there has got to be infrastructure for them. There have to be the jobs; there has to be the social wage, the hospitals, the schools and the housing. We don’t have an immigrant problem, we have a problem of managing labour flow, and if we do have an immigrant problem, it’s this: we are an ageing population. To pay for old codgers like myself in years to come we need more young people. It’s estimated we need a million people a year to maintain the tax base. Our immigrant problem is that we don’t have enough immigrants. But that’s not my point. My point is that the whole way we think about this fundamentally depends on how we see ‘we’ and ‘they’. Do we divide in national terms? Do we divide in terms of class? Do we divide in terms of ordinary people versus elites? We are stuck in this debate because we are stuck in particular categories. There is nothing more revolutionary than changing the way we see categories through which we see ‘we’ or ‘they’. Or even changing the way in which we understand a given category. What does it mean to be British? There’s no right or wrong answer to that. It’s a domain of struggle, where we can claim progressive values, values of inclusiveness and of concern, whereas others claim imperial values. My first point then was: embrace the power of the group. My second point was defining ‘we’ and ‘they’ is the most revolutionary thing we can do. My third point is embrace the passion of the group. We’re often afraid of passion, we’re afraid of passion in academia. We think that if somebody is passionate, they’re likely to be biased. And therefore our most phenomenal skill is taking interesting things and making them incredibly dull. So don’t be afraid of passion, because passion is not in contrast to or distinct from reason. You can’t have reason without passion, you can’t have passion without reason. If I say to you, ‘I am furious about Grenfell Tower’, I’m telling you something about the way the world is organised, and how I see it as being organised, and what’s wrong with the way I see it being organised. Through emotion comes reason. And if I tell you that people in Grenfell Tower died for want of £1000 for a sprinkler, when money is spent on reducing the tax burden for people in £6.1 million houses, I would be amazed if you didn’t feel a little bit angry, and if you don’t feel a little bit angry, I would be a little bit worried about you. Embrace passion. Passion is critical to politics. Passion mobilises, and we
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shouldn’t be afraid of it. Embrace the joy of the group. One of the problems of revolutionaries, and of people in politics, who are obsessed by things political is that they are suspicious of joy. When I was a student, I was very involved in student politics, I was on the executive of the National Union of Students. I remember going to conferences where we would stay up until 3am discussing the situation in Nicaragua. That to me was interesting, and exciting, but I’m weird. People become involved in politics when politics is part of their life. When the politics is a seamless part of the joy of being with others – where you drink with others as well as think with others. There’s a Puritan streak in revolutionaries which we should discard. This isn’t to deny the importance of ideas. Groups inescapably have ideologies and are about ideas. And to make groups just about being together misses that point. But it is equally wrong to ignore the importance of being together. The fact that we come together, and we feel support from others, and others validate our view of the world, is something which is a wonderful experience. It commits people to the group, it makes people want to come back for more. Any politics which misses out on that misses out on the glue that binds us to each other and to the group. ‘Meta-cognition is absolutely central’ So, don’t be afraid of groups, construct we-ness, embrace the passion of groups, embrace the fun of groups. And there’s one more point I want to make. If I have to identify one place where our notion of psychology gets it wrong, it would be that we start from the premise that to understand what you’re going to do I should look at what you think. There are whole industries based on this. Opinion polling. Every day, every hour, more polls. But one of the things that psychology – at least, some work in psychology – tells us is that a lot of the time, what is most important in terms of what I do, and certainly what we do collectively, is not what I think, but what I think you think. Not representation, but meta-representation. My understanding of what is normative, what we believe in, not what I believe in. There is research for instance that before the Gulf War, before the invasion of Iraq, most Americans didn’t believe in it. Most Americans believed that other Americans believed in it, and therefore people didn’t protest because they thought that if they did, they would be on their own, and people would look down upon them. Metacognition is absolutely central. Dictators understand this. There’s a literature say, on the fascist salute. Why did they institute the Nazi salute? Does it make you change your mind? Probably not. You could give a Nazi salute but know you were giving it, but not believing in it – know you were giving it, because if you didn’t, you’d be repressed. But if I see another person give the salute, if I see you give the salute, I can’t afford to take the chance that you don’t mean it, and therefore it leads me to believe that you believe
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it. And therefore you can have a society which nobody believes in, but everybody believes that others believe in, and so it still functions. There’s a magnificent old story, that won a Sunday Times Short Story Award in about 1978. It’s about time travel. You can go back to any event in history. The people in the story went back to the Crucifixion. And they are told, you can do anything you like, but you’ve got to accept the outcome, you have to go along with whatever happens in history, you can’t violate it. So when Pontius Pilate says, ‘Do you want Jesus to be crucified?’, they cry, ‘Yes!’, and then they look around and they realise that everyone who is crying ‘yes’ is a time traveller who doesn’t want to change history by doing what they think that other people should do. I think that’s a beautiful metaphor for politics. Meta-cognition is really powerful. It’s a means by which people can dominate us, because they dominate the means of communication. We know what we think, but we don’t know what you think, because we get our understanding of what you think from the media, in various ways. If we want to be revolutionary, if we want to turn things around, we need to turn that around as well. We need to use the new social media to overcome those problems. We need to sign publicly where we stand. A badge is not about what I believe, it’s about what we believe, and what we see in others. The public nature of protest can be incredibly creative. One of my favourite examples involves people in Stalinist Poland who wanted to show they didn’t support the regime. They started by not watching the telly. The news broadcasts were just propaganda. And then people realised that had no effect because it was private. So then they went for a walk, publicly, when the news broadcast was on. That was a public act, a political act. And then, some people went out with their TV in a pram or trolley to show they weren’t watching. We can use humour and we can use creativity to tell each other, not just ‘I am outraged’, but ‘We are outraged’. I just want to finish by saying this: don’t be afraid of outrage. We should be outraged. A world that could be so wonderful, and yet is so obscene. Let’s not be afraid of the resource that we have to overcome it, which is each other, which is collectivity. Let’s embrace the group. Let’s come together in the group. Let’s tell each other about our membership of the group. In this way, let’s do something to make this world a little better, and not just for a few. Stephen D. Reicher is Wardlaw Professor of Psychology at the University of St Andrews. Find much more from him on our website. Thanks to Latitude Festival and the Wellcome Trust for hosting the event, and to Kate Brennan for transcription. For the full transcript, including introduction and audience Q+A, see thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-30/ november-2017/rules-unruliness; you will also find a link to a podcast version. Professor Reicher will also be a keynote speaker at the Society’s 2018 Annual Conference in Nottingham. See www.bps.org.uk/ac2018
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Making room for values and emotions Vivienne Laidler with an introduction to acceptance and commitment therapy through the literary work Room on the Broom, by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler Is the popular children’s book a fable of third wave cognitive and behavioural therapy in disguise?
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First published 2001 by Macmillan Children’s Books an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers International Limited Text copyright © Julia Donaldson 2001 Illustrations copyright © Axel Scheffler 2001
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cceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) is a ‘third wave’ cognitive and behavioural therapy that often uses metaphors to demonstrate key therapeutic concepts. Continuing the use of metaphors, the popular 2002 children’s book Room on the Broom provides an introduction to ACT that may be useful for both teaching and clinical work. In this delightful tale, a witch loses several valued items whilst travelling on her life’s journey. She can only reconnect with these items by making room for a variety of animal passengers. The witch navigates further adversity when her broomstick breaks. If we think of the animals as emotions, and the witch’s journey by broomstick as her travel towards her values, then this story can bring to life the theory and practice of ACT. Values, willingness and actions We start by discovering what the witch cares about. Her tall hat, long plait and wand could represent valued actions; particular goals or behaviours that take her towards her values. Our values are like a compass direction guiding our actions (Hayes et al., 1999), and we can move towards our values in many different ways. Life soon brings challenges: ‘the wind blew so wildly it blew off the hat’. Difficult circumstances can take us away from our values. When we try to pursue our valued goals, difficult feelings may show up. Emotions are an integral part of caring; if we care, we open ourselves up to the possibility of worry, sadness, anger, embarrassment, shame, and so on. As the witch seeks her hat, a dog shows up and she is posed a key question: Can she make room for difficult feelings so that she can have this thing she cares about? ‘Is there room on the broom for a dog like me?’ The witch is willing to experience difficult feelings: ‘“Yes!” cried the witch, and the dog clambered on’, and this willingness allows her to move towards her values: ‘whoosh! they were gone’.
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the psychologist november 2017 eye on fiction
Connecting with values is important, but holding them too tightly can cause problems; for example, other values may become neglected. ‘The witch laughed aloud and held onto her hat, but away blew the bow from her long ginger plait!’ The witch is repeatedly asked to make room for difficult feelings so she can pursue her values. ‘Is there room on the broom for a bird/frog like me?’ She reclaims her valued possessions by making room for more animals; perhaps life might ask if she can make room for fear if it meant she could go back to work; can she make room for pain and frustration if it meant she could play with her grandchildren? But then, the unthinkable happens: ‘the broom snapped in two!’. What about when the witch really can’t pursue her valued goal? We may encounter circumstances that we cannot change, including health problems or disabilities. There may be valued actions that we cannot carry out. It is interesting to look at the witch’s psychological experience, how she becomes stuck, and how she creates a good outcome. The ACT perspective on struggle and suffering The witch encounters adversity and quickly loses sight of her values; perhaps she neglects her relationships or health. She loses direction: ‘the witch’s half-broomstick flew into a cloud’. Scary thoughts turn up for the
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witch, and are represented by the dragon: ‘the witch heard a roar that was scary and loud’. Perhaps these thoughts are recurring stories for the witch; maybe she feels ‘useless’. The witch fuses with her negative thoughts; she really believes them. She can interact with these thoughts, feel the fire, hear the licking of lips; the dragon seems real. In the same way that the dragon threatens the witch, so too we tend to think of our emotions as dangerous (Luoma et al., 2007). We ‘die of embarrassment’; we are ‘eaten up by worry’. We add a layer of thoughts onto our emotions and, unsurprisingly, become unwilling to experience our feelings. The witch attempts to rid herself of her difficult thoughts and feelings: ‘“No!” cried the witch, flying higher and higher’. Perhaps she tries to think positively, but she finds that her difficult thoughts come back worse: ‘The dragon flew after her, breathing out fire.’ She tries to get away from her thoughts in a different way, ‘flying down to the ground’. Perhaps she avoids challenging situations; but this doesn’t work either: ‘the dragon drew nearer… licking his lips’. So long as the witch is unwilling to have her difficult thoughts, the thoughts chase after her. This encounter illustrates the ACT concept of ‘creative hopelessness’ (Hayes et al., 1999). The aim of creative hopelessness is to help someone notice that trying to control and get rid of unwanted thoughts
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involves having our emotions as they are, without adding to them by trying to control or evaluate them (Hayes et al., 1999). The witch experiences ‘clean’ discomfort now that she has defused from her difficult thoughts; the emotions (cat, dog, frog and bird) wash themselves clean. At this point, the witch Dr Vivienne Laidler demonstrates the central ACT is a Clinical Psychologist in the concept of ‘psychological Department of Clinical & Health flexibility’. She is willing to have Psychology, St James’s University her emotions as they are, and she Hospital, Leeds is defused from her thoughts, Vivienne.Laidler@nhs.net which are in the background. If she can also connect with the present moment, this will enable her to recognise opportunities and make small moves Moving forward What happens next? Of course, the witch lets go of the towards her values. Looking closely at the pictures without getting drawn to the dragon, the animals or struggle and stops fighting her difficult thoughts and the witch herself, we can notice the pine cone, stick, feelings. To do this, she needs to be willing to feel her bone and lily. These represent opportunities for the emotions fully and without defence. Within the ACT literature, Harris (2011) invites us to observe emotions witch, and are about to become important. The witch creates a potion using these as if we are a curious marine biologist observing a rare opportunities, which, as we now expect, have sea creature. Similarly, in the poem, the witch observes associated emotions: ‘the frog found a lily, the cat the ‘beast’: ‘It was tall, dark and sticky, and feathered and furred. It had four frightful heads, it had wings like found a cone, the bird found a twig and the dog found a bone’. The witch demonstrates committed action; a bird. And its terrible voice, when it started to speak, she gets back on with moving towards her values, even was a yowl and a growl and a croak and a shriek.’ By after she has gone off-track. owning, observing and making room for emotions, these become less threatening and the witch can make a choice about what to do next. Outcomes and endings The witch is also willing to meet her difficult The witch puts together these small patterns of thoughts face-to-face. She may name the story ‘Ah, action to create a ‘truly magnificent broom’, which there’s the scary dragon story again’ (Harris, 2011). represents her new valued journey that allows for all By doing this, the witch experiments with the ACT her feelings. These may include sadness that things process of defusion. She unhooks from her scary aren’t the same as before, or regret that she hasn’t made thoughts, observing them and letting them pass. This changes sooner (Harris, 2009). ACT uses a ‘passengers allows her to gain some distance from her thoughts, at on the bus’ analogy. If the witch can make room which point they may lose their power and influence. for the passengers, then she can travel towards her This defusion is described in the book: ‘the dragon values. Some feelings such as pain might need extra drew back and he started to shake’; ‘he spread out his wings and was off accommodation. The witch may need to do things Key sources slightly differently; hence she builds a different style of through the sky’. The illustrations broomstick. She can follow a new style of movement in also capture this beautifully: the her valued direction. thought (dragon) is still present in Harris, R. (2009). ACT made simple. How can we measure this successful outcome? All the background; the aim is not to Oakland, CA: New Harbinger. Harris, R. (2011). The reality slap. the emotions are still present and are welcomed: ‘seats get rid of the thought, but for it to London: Robinson. for the witch and the cat and the dog, a nest for the become less central and powerful. Hayes, S.C., Strosahl, K.D. & Wilson, bird and a shower for the frog’. In ACT, a successful Just as the beast protects the K.G. (1999). Acceptance and commitment outcome involves acceptance of emotions, and witch, our emotions exist to protect therapy: An experiential approach to engagement in valued activities. us in certain situations. ‘“Thank behaviour change. New York: Guilford. The story concludes with two points relating to you, oh thank you!” the grateful Luoma, J.B., Hayes, S.C. & Walser, R.D. (2007). Learning ACT. Oakland, CA: New values. First, values have no endpoint, so the witch witch cried’. In ACT, we may Harbinger. continues in her valued direction ‘whoosh! they were kindly thank our emotions or our gone’. Second, where values are involved, there are thoughts, to help build willingness For a trilogy of interviews about ACT, always emotions. As my child pointed out, in the and defusion. The story introduces see tinyurl.com/ACTtrilogy concluding picture, ‘I think the owl wants to get on the idea of ‘clean’ versus ‘dirty’ the broom...’ discomfort. ‘Clean’ discomfort and feelings might not be helpful. The witch is no longer travelling in a clear valued direction, instead she goes higher, then down to the ground; she is using up her energy trying to get rid of what she doesn’t want. This unworkable action can leave people stuck. The witch’s encounter with the dragon is like the ACT metaphor ‘tug of war with a monster’ (Hayes et al., 1999). Instead of being able to win this fight, it actually restricts the witch from travelling towards her values. ACT suggests that it can be more helpful to drop this struggle.
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the psychologist november 2017 eye on fiction
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From mythical idealisation to political and personal reality Dr Joanna North, winner of the Society’s Award for Distinguished Contributions to Professional Psychology What lessons can be drawn from 10 years of running an Ofstedregistered adoption support agency?
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Joanna North is a Chartered Psychologist & BACP Accredited Psychotherapist www.joannanorth.co.uk
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hildren can act out in bizarre and disturbing ways when they feel threatened by new experiences, when they are afraid and insecure. As a psychotherapist and psychologist in this work, I can end up holding in mind a lot of disturbed behaviour. At such times of confusion I always bring myself back to a central principle of psychological work: always listen and remain focused on the client rather than the theory. My adoptive parents are not just moaning and complaining, they are telling us about their lives. That particular client, in that particular moment, has unique needs. Even during the most chaotic episodes I have noticed that adopters really find it healing to be considered as an individual rather than an object to be worked on. This is true for clients who at first appear difficult and defensive, as well as those who are vulnerable and distressed. When we identify the strengths of the client, they can build their own healing pathway through what at first appears to be indecipherable behaviour from a child. If I am supportive and empathic and work with them on the journey, I’m much more likely to get the outcome that I want: a supportive parent providing good care during good times and bad. This is what I have to model, and this is what I can start to do by listening. The second principle is to focus on my own selfcare, so that I am fit for practice and fit for my life. It’s too easy to disappear in a slurry of demand, and I have learned that I can work very hard as long as I give back time to myself to rest and play very hard too. Simple centring practices such as stretching, breathing and yoga keep me focused and feeling well, and I take regular breaks and focus on my own hobbies. My service users notice when my batteries are running down and seem glad I am taking a break. This is another mirror of what I am asking the adoptive parents to do. We have a saying – ‘put your own oxygen mask on first before you help others’. I have to
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the psychologist november 2017 adoption
nature of parental love, with everyone living happily be a good model of this for my adoptive parents or ever after? This is what we have all believed, this they won’t believe me. mythical view of adopting someone else’s baby knitted Aside from these abiding principles, which into the fabric of society. The idea that adopted serve me time and time again in this work, I think children might always crave a relationship or have the key learning that I would want to share is that a biological sense of the primary parent from whom I have learned not to be afraid to risk failure. If you they were separated was not part of either social or put any effort into a project, you might not get the psychological consciousness in the past. It was never exact outcome that you planned for; but you will discussed. It is now becoming a part of our everyday get an outcome. There have been times over the last thinking and discourse about adopted children. 10 years of maintaining my adoption agency that I It is true that for many adopted children, adoption have been faced with potential failure: for example, is a happy and secure process. National figures on drastic government cuts in 2012 meant that local ‘failed’ or unhappy adoption have never been formally authorities were not spending money on adoption gathered, but it is believed that it may be up to 20 per support services, and my income plummeted to a cent that are fraught with continuous difficulty, starting degree that I thought that I would have to close it with troublesome anxiety about attachment within the down. I temporarily let my office out and worked family home, and potentially ‘ending’ with children from home, and undertook agency work at Child and being sent back into care or walking out in their Adolescent Mental Health Services. This was both teenage years. This is the area where adoption support a blessing and a wonderful learning experience, but was recognised as a necessary part of the package of it was also an enormous challenge: a day’s work at extreme change families are subjected to. CAMHS and stopping off to see the adoption support Children are adopted because service users on my way home or their primary homes are insufficient at weekends. I felt absolutely at to meet an acceptable standard sea, but I would not let go of what “Contrary to populist of care. Contrary to populist I had created. My instinct said that views in the press, it is not views in the press, it is not easy to things would change. Then two easy to take a child out of take a child out of a pathogenic years ago government funding was or abusive environment. Social released for adoption support and a pathogenic or abusive workers cannot go into homes there is now a demand for adoption environment” heavy handed, to snatch babies support agencies – and my agency from innocent parents who are is there, not lost on the tide of trying their best. It takes very economics as I feared it might be, extreme circumstances for children to be taken from but up and running and open for business. Don’t fear their homes without warning (one way being a Police failure, and don’t ever give up if you feel that what you Protection Order, which requires special consent), and are offering matters. even once this is achieved it takes at least a further year of court proceedings for an Adoption Order to be made by a judge who has determined that there is never The changing face of adoption any chance of a child being cared for to a reasonable The face of adoption has changed dramatically over degree by their parents. The test is of significant harm the last 60 years in this country. We are more skilled to the child, through neglect or indirect or direct abuse at identifying the psychological impact on adoptees, (physical, mental, emotional or sexual). A threshold particularly on their sense of identity and belonging, has to be reached where it is deemed that a parent just and the effects of trauma and broken attachment on cannot provide an environment in which the child can the sensitive and developing brain of a child. What thrive with a sense or security or reach life goals. Even was historically a very private and personal experience if meeting this criterion of significant harm is proved for families has become a process run by statutory in the courts, it is often the case that children remain demands and procedures, deeply embedded in our in foster care and have regular contact with their birth social and political structures. Yet this sophisticated parent during that time. It will take a minimum of a social machinery has not made adoption either year of foster care before any child is finally found an smoother or less complex. There remains around the adoptive parent, and this is not always straightforward. process of adopting children a critical tension between There is no doubt an infant is an appealing bundle: the rights of a child to be with a birth parent and the developmentally, a baby will adapt quickly to a new rights of a child to a life free from harm. carer and so it is easier for babies to be placed. A child Why do adopters need support? Surely being an who is placed into foster care at two will possibly be adoptive parent is just like being any other parent, and the lines of difference are blurred by the overwhelming three by the time they are adopted, and that is a lot
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who are often shocked to have their hopes and dreams of development under the bridge with an interim floundering. foster carer before the child is finally settled. What Adoptive parents have their own adaptation to this means is that during the adoption process the make as parents: we forget this, thinking it is about child may have experienced three primary carers in keeping the child happy. If we add to the mix the as many years: the primary parent in which care will possibility that children have undiagnosed conditions have been either pathogenic, abusive or neglectful, the foster parent where the attachment formed is only ever that need extra sensitive care of their special paediatric needs, for example fetal alcohol syndrome and children temporary, and the final destination of the adoptive born drug-addicted, we can see where the stress parent. It is not really surprising then that a threeemerges from. Children may also year-old may arrive with a new have inherited neurodevelopmental adoptive parent feeling less than “Adoptive parents have conditions such as autism and confident about permanency in ADHD, or learning difficulties, life, even assuming that the process their own adaptation to which profoundly affect their of foster care has gone well and make as parents: behaviour and make them hard the child has had a satisfactory we forget this, thinking to understand or help in the early experience of human attachment. stages. This is all aside from the And this is an extremely it is about keeping the child’s underlying vulnerability straightforward example. Many child happy” to stress due to the trauma of children in our current social separation and very likely the environment are adopted in groups harm caused by abuse or neglect in ranging from a duo to a group of infancy. Do you start to get a picture of what modern six or more. I can’t quite think of anyone who adoptive parents are up against? would be prepared to meet the needs of a group of children who have come to harm… without some support. Fortunately our last Prime Minister, David Towards a model Cameron, took a personal interest in supporting In 2010 I took the time to understand these processes adoptive parents, and following scoping and in a more in-depth way, completing a doctoral feedback made a fund available – even in these research degree with Metanoia and Middlesex austere times – so that adoptive parents can have University into looking after adopted children with the emotional and psychological support that they troubled behaviour. This culminated in a workbook need to survive the transition into their adoptive for parents advising them on how to understand a ‘for ever’ family. child who has been adopted and why their mindset This is where adoption support might be different. The book, How to Think About becomes important: helping new Key sources Caring for a Child with Difficult Behaviour has sold and relatively naive carers to over 1000 copies. In 2015 I followed it up with understand why their little person Mindful Therapeutic Childcare, which discusses further or people may not be able to return Fonagy, P., Gergely, G., Jurist, E. & Target, M. (2004). Affect regulation, developments in my thinking about the care of immediately the endless love that mentalization and the development of the troubled children. More recently I published Mind Kind they wish to offer, or why even they self. London: Karnac. – Your Child’s Mental Health. may actively reject and fight this. Fonagy, P. & Target, M. (1997). The model that I propose makes the construct Indeed, their love may be a threat Attachment and reflective function: of mentalisation, from Peter Fonagy, Howard Steele to a small child. New adoptive Their role in self-organisation. and others. I stress the importance of securing the parents need to understand the Development and Psychopathology, 9, 679–700. mind of the parent (Steele at al., 2003), a capacity that defensiveness of any small child Howe, D. (2003). Attachment disorders. is particularly important for adopted children with who may be fighting for their Attachment and Human Development, a history of maltreatment. My work, based on this psychological survival, given that 5(3), 265–270. model enables parents to become ‘mediator, reflector, they don’t know what is happening Howe, D. (2005). Child abuse and interpreter, and moderator of the child’s mind’ (Slade, to them. It’ s not their fault that they neglect: Attachment, development and 2005), providing a secure and unambiguous base for had to change carer; it’s not their intervention. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. their child. I have made it the focus of my work to find fault that they had to leave their Lieberman, A.F. (2003). The treatment straightforward ways of supporting the development primary home in the first place. of attachment disorder in infancy and of reflective function in parents, so that they are The impact of this anxiety early childhood. Attachment and Human well placed to see any problems as issues arising on the child’s developing brain is Development, 5(3), 279–282. from attachment disorders. Simplifying complex obvious, but how to manage it so Magagna, J. (2003). Clinical concepts psychological concepts for parents enables them to that the child returns to a secure and caregiving contexts. In C. Archer & A. Burnell (Eds.) Trauma, attachment understand their child’s otherwise overwhelming state of mind from which to feel and family permanence: Fear can stop difficulties as episodes of despair and upset, revealed confident and happy about new you loving (pp.97–112). London: Jessica carers is a complicated and nuanced through challenging behaviour. We offer solutions for Kingsley Publishers. management that provide hope and self-efficacy. process that requires sensitive All of this work has to take place within the support… particularly of the carers,
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09/10/2017 13:11
Kavita Vedhara ‘Imagine the brave new world… these are small psychological interventions capable of big effects’ Our editor Jon Sutton meets Professor Kavita Vedhara (University of Nottingham)
We’re here at the Psychobiology Section conference. Everybody these days accepts that link between the ‘psycho’ and the ‘bio’. What is it that you are doing to take the study of that relationship to the next level? I’m not unique in being interested in this, but the one thing that’s really characterised my work, even from the early days of my PhD, has been trying to establish the relevance of those relationships. It’s all very well showing some really nice well-controlled experimental studies where you see an association between, let’s say, stress and the immune system not working as well. But I’ve always wanted to know, What difference does that make? One of the criticisms people have had of the work that I have done is that I have moved around diseases… one minute it’s HIV, the next it’s the diabetic foot, and really that’s because I’ve never found myself wedded to a disease entity. Some people do, they get a name for doing work in a particular disease context, but I’ve always been interested in the underlying question.
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Can you give me an example from that HIV work? Here was a disease that attacked the immune system directly. In my limited understanding of disease at the time, I thought this is bizarre… here is a disease that impacts on your ability to fight all other illnesses, what is that? Understanding that psychology or emotional distress can also undermine your immune system, straight away the question for me was, What happens if a person is HIV positive and they are depressed, does that mean they die faster? That was essentially what I was asking in my PhD: What’s the clinical relevance of that relationship between our psychological functioning and those biological consequences? We found that people who at baseline had higher levels of emotional distress were dying faster, they were losing more CD4 cells over time. That wasn’t related to their own perceptions of the severity of the disease.
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the psychologist november 2017 interview
around on the carpet because that soaks it up…’ You can’t get much more important than whether As I heard this, I’m thinking, ‘Surely you can see that’s people die or not. In your talk yesterday, you introduced me to the diabetic foot ulcer and just how a bad idea?’, but for him it made complete sense. serious a condition like that is – and how impacted it Surely with most conditions, in most medical can be by what’s going on mentally. contexts, that is the case, that people get conflicting I was reading this lovely experimental stuff coming advice? A lot of the public health campaigns, for out of the States saying that wound healing was example around cancer, have increasingly become delayed by short periods of stress, and I just thought, based on confrontational coping, but I doubt that ‘What happens if it’s not an experimental wound?’ All the quality of information about what people should those little puncture marks, they’re going to heal at actually do to ‘kick cancer’s butt’ has actually got some point. What really happens when that wound any clearer. Do you think those campaigns are going takes a long time to heal? I don’t think I had ever down the wrong route? heard of a diabetic foot ulcer. I was scratching my My sense would be that they are short-sighted. head thinking, ‘What kind of chronic wound?’ Take the ‘five portions a day’ campaign. If you I started talking to some clinical colleagues and they fundamentally believe that people get cancer because said the obvious chronic wound is the diabetic foot they smoke, or they have bad genes, whatever you ulcer, but you don’t want to look at that, that’s really think the causes are, and somebody comes along and messy, really complicated, you’ll never find an effect says ‘eat fruit and veg’, that’s putting a round peg into of psychological factors on that! But then the more a square hole, that’s not going to make any sense to I looked into it, the more I realised it was a hugely them and therefore they are not going to enact that underresearched area, an important clinical problem, and actually there was every reason to expect that there behaviour. I remember a talk that John Weinman gave, to do with a guy who had lost his sense of smell, and would be some psychological influences, because we all of the medical information he was getting made know that people are distressed when they get these no sense to him, it didn’t fit in with wounds, we know they last a long his belief about why he had lost time… it seemed alien to me that “the more I looked into it, his sense of smell. As long as you there wouldn’t be psychological factors at play. the more I realised it was are in that predicament, you’re not going to be able to get people to a hugely underresearched change their behaviour, because And what psychological factors area, an important clinical they don’t see the relevance. did you end up finding? To this guy drying up his weeping Unexpectedly, we found an effect of problem, and actually wound on the carpet, he had a confrontational coping. Normally there was every reason memory that it was really important you would expect that to be a to expect that there would for his feet to be dry. That’s where protective mechanism, because patients’ beliefs about their it epitomises people wanting be some psychological illness are hugely influential in to be actively involved in the influences” understanding why people do what management of their health and they do. do something about it. ‘I’ve got this wound, it won’t get the better And patients’ beliefs more broadly about their of me’, that kind of spirit. But we found, and it’s the mortality? classic unexpected but interesting finding that makes Yes, we measured patients’ beliefs about their ulcers, you think again about what’s important… when we at baseline… when we got to the end of that, five saw this coming out, my first thought was, ‘Oh no, years later, I started to become aware of this other we’ve entered the data incorrectly!’ We went back, but literature on how beliefs can affect mortality in sure enough, people who were more confrontational other chronic diseases that were not dissimilar to were much less likely to heal. diabetes. Unfortunately 50 per cent of patients die within five years – higher than the mortality rates Why? for the most common cancers. So we observed that Our post-hoc explanation was that these patients identity beliefs at baseline, that is patients’ beliefs appear to be left very uncertain about what they about their symptoms, predicted mortality up to nine need to do to manage these wounds. We did quite years later. It was a very enduring effect. But what a lot of qualitative work as part of this study, and it was most interesting to me was not just the statistical wasn’t uncommon for people to say to us, ‘It’s really significance of identity beliefs, but looking at what else confusing, my nurse says one thing, my GP says another, my podiatrist says something else… I’m going identity beliefs correlated with, and that’s when we start seeing this cluster of beliefs patients had which to do what makes sense to me.’ The anecdote that were clearly putting them at risk of death within that sticks in my mind is the gentleman who said, ‘As soon follow-up period. So these were patients who believed as I get home, I take off my socks and shoes and I just their ulcers had a huge effect on them emotionally, that make sure the air’s there, keep the wound dry, walk
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they would last for a long time, that they couldn’t do much to influence the outcomes… And they didn’t actually have worse ulcers? Yes, we controlled for the size, number of previous ulcers, infection, all the things you might think would make a difference to whether or not somebody died, even when you put those in the model identity beliefs are still important. Just going back to clinical relevance… one aspect of that is getting the right help to the people who need it most. One thing that was news to me from you work is that vaccines don’t work equally well with everybody, and that there are all kinds of psychological factors that might affect that. Absolutely. They don’t work as well in older people, and people who are experiencing negative mood, whether it is stress or depression. So the first study I did looked at chronically stressed carers, who are experiencing a double whammy. They’ve got two reasons why the vaccinations might not work for them – an ageing immune system, and chronic stress compounding that effect. We found that the flu vaccine didn’t work as well in our chronically stressed caregivers. Only about 27 per cent of caregivers were protected against flu after vaccination, compared with a control group where it was more like 65 per cent. Caregivers are important to our society, both in terms of their ability to give care but also their own wellbeing – they’re vulnerable themselves. In a time of rationed resources in the NHS, one of the ways forward is to ask which people would benefit most from psychological interventions which could optimise the effectiveness of their treatments. You mention resources. One of your findings is that the mood on the day of vaccination can make a difference to how effective it is. That brings to mind the possibility of fairly brief, simple interventions, but that’s going to cost money and time. Does it cost more money if it doesn’t happen? As part of any analysis we would look at the cost effectiveness, but my sense is that if we can develop some kind of brief intervention that can be delivered on a tablet or phone, with individualised content… Is it a funny dog video? People like funny dog videos. It’s not a funny dog video. Maybe next time we’ll put in a funny dog video, for you. At the moment it has a bit of Fawlty Towers, Two Ronnies… bear in mind we’re aiming at an older age group.
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Del Boy falling through the bar, that kind of thing? We didn’t think about that! That is a classic. But my sense is that once you develop those kinds of things, particularly if they are delivered digitally, they don’t cost a lot of money. Have it on in the waiting room. If you can even increase the effectiveness of the vaccinations by 10–15 per cent, for a price that’s
probably cheaper than the vaccination, you could increase the likelihood that it’s protecting people. Because it’s quick and cheap, you can think about it being a public health intervention, so everyone gets it during flu season. Imagine the brave new world, in which they send you your appointment and at the same time you download that year’s positive mood intervention, watch it on the day of your appointment, go get your vaccination, bingo – it improves it 10 per cent and costs peanuts to deliver. Certainly the effect size of the positive mood work – we haven’t published yet, it’s under review – it’s the same as you see for cholesterol-lowering medication. These are potentially small psychological treatments capable of big effects. These are all ‘vaccine adjuvants’ – can you give me some other examples? I like to think that the direction of travel for most of my work is effectively developing psychological adjuvants. One way in which our discipline can make a difference to health is by saying, ‘These are the pathways, these are the clinical mechanisms’… so take fertility, we know that the success rate of IVF has not changed in decades, it’s about 25 per cent. Let’s say that the findings we’ve got recently, on cortisol affecting the effectiveness of IVF, are robust… we could be talking about developing some kind of lifestyle intervention to put in place before people go for a round of IVF, to modify their levels of the hormone so it’s optimised before treatment, to increase the chances that it works. That becomes a psychological adjuvant. You’re taking an existing treatment and optimising it, by adding something to the mix. It’s the same with where we want to go with the wound-healing work. The classic way that diabetic foot ulcers are managed is that you get regular appointments, you go once or twice a week, for maybe several months, the wound is cleaned, it’s debrided, you have antibiotic treatment if it is infected… if we add into that mix a psychological treatment that enables patients to really understand which bits of the management of their foot health they can influence, like ‘You need to look at it regularly – if you see any changes, get an appointment straight away’, there are things that they can do and things that they can’t do, and a lot of the difficulty for that patient group is not knowing which is which. Feelings of low control are really common in that patient group – if we can do something to enable them, the hypothesis would be that we’ll see better outcomes. You work in a medical school. Are your more medically minded colleagues on board with this input? Has that changed over the years? Thankfully yes it has. I’m really fortunate – I don’t know if Nottingham is unique in this, but I certainly feel that my medical colleagues are completely on board with the fact that psychology has got something to offer medicine. I do not feel that is a battle I have to win. That compares favourably with my very first conversation with a clinician, years ago, when I was
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the psychologist november 2017 interview
doing my PhD – a gentleman who was a consultant in infectious diseases, managing the local HIV population at the time. I went with my supervisor to have a chat with him… he was incredibly polite, but was very clear that he thought what I was doing was a complete waste of time. He said, ‘It’s clearly not going to have any effect whatsoever, it’s all about the disease, it’s a very powerful infection, there’s not going to be a role for psychological factors here, but I don’t mind if you come in and do it, be my guest.’ Almost ‘What harm can you do?’ He was humouring me. I think he was blown away when we got the results that we did. It comes back to the data, and from your talk I can see you’re fond of systematic reviews. You don’t want to waste your time on things that aren’t going to have a decent impact, and with that kind of approach to research and gathering together other people’s research you’re going to make persuasive arguments to people who need persuading. That’s an interesting point, I’ve not really thought about it before, and that’s maybe something that’s happened almost subconsciously. But I’ve become aware of the sort of evidence that persuades clinicians that what we are doing is important, and systematic reviews are absolutely up there. The vaccine work is a case in point – I wanted to take it forward but it has been quite difficult to get that work funded. It was about five years ago that I thought, ‘I need to start by
just systematically reviewing the literature, so that we can say this is what’s out there, this is what we know, this is what we know about the effect size.’ There was work out there, but it’s very clear there’s a huge amount of scope to do this work even better, and instead of operating in silos where we might look at physical activity, or diet, or mood, we look across the data and see what would work best. Had we not done the review and the subsequent observation study, I wouldn’t have got to mood on day of vaccination in a month of Sundays. These methods exist and we should use them, because they allow us to be more convincing to funders and collaborators, but also it’s really important that we make the best use of the data that’s already out there. That’s in keeping with the idea of open science, and data repositories, so that we can say, ‘Here I am, 10 years later, can I take a look at this question now?’ It’s a fascinating and brilliant opportunity if used appropriately. I think that is the future for science. And do you make best use of the data in your personal life? Possibly not! I’ve got two small children… you have no time for yourself. I look forward wistfully to the day I can resume getting fit. I used to do a lot of running, but at the moment I’m fairly sedentary and probably don’t eat as well as I should do. But it’s getting better! I’m aware of what my goals are.
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Pushing beyond the stereotypes of voice-hearing Charles Fernyhough describes how the Hearing the Voice project helped design the video game Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
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efined in terms of its cardinal features of hallucinations and delusions, psychosis can be one of the most extreme human experiences. If its treatment in film and TV so often resorts to damaging stereotypes, the relatively new medium of video games arguably has less of a cliché count to wade through, while also offering opportunities to depict the experience with genuine immersive interactivity. Hearing the Voice is an interdisciplinary project on the experience of hearing voices (or auditory hallucination), funded by the Wellcome Trust since 2012. We bring academics (from disciplines as diverse as theology and cognitive neuroscience) together with individuals with lived experience of voice-hearing to tackle questions such as how voices relate to memory, how they can best be managed (in cases when people find them distressing), and how they shed light on typical perceptual processes in the brain. A particular interest is in the experience’s phenomenology, where the humanities offer us methods and conceptual apparatus for making sense of human experience that the cognitive neurosciences largely lack. We were excited, then, to get an opportunity to feed into Hellblade’s design process on the phenomenology
of voice-hearing. Our approach is that it is a highly varied phenomenon that is lived with, battled with and often celebrated by people in endlessly divergent ways. Independent game design company Ninja Theory were evidently keen to treat the science properly, but above all they wanted to put the experience first. With support from the Wellcome Trust they set out to engage people who with experience of psychosis in consultations overseen by the game’s mental health expert Paul Fletcher. Hearing the Voice started talking to Ninja Theory about voices in October 2015. We wanted to make sure that the team were aware of some of the latest research on the extreme diversity of the experience, such as its often uncertain position on the boundary between hearing and thinking, its frequent lack of verbal or even auditory features, and growing insights that it is more akin to an experience of being communicated with than to a frank act of audition. We had constructive conversations about how the game might depict the personified, characterful nature of many heard voices, their overlap with other auditory phenomena such as natural and animal sounds and the murmuring of crowds, and how to represent their strong association with somatic sensations such as
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the psychologist november 2017 culture feelings of presence, bodily tinglings and burning on the skin. A big part of Hellblade’s portrayal of hearing voices is the use of binaural audio, which can situate sounds around and inside the listener’s head. (Without headphones, you miss a lot of the effect.) We put Ninja Theory in touch with Rachel Waddingham and Voice Collective, the London-based project working with young people who hear voices. Rachel subsequently visited the studio with two young voice-hearers, along with the volunteers Paul Fletcher had been working with from Recovery College East. They literally helped to sculpt the sound design, experimenting with placing the sound sources themselves, listening back and giving feedback, in a process that resulted in an extraordinarily authentic portrayal of voice-hearing. A group of us from Hearing the Voice sat down together to play the game shortly after its release. The gameplay is striking in its emotional intensity, thanks to a meticulous and creative design process and an all-in performance from lead actor Melina Juergens. From the spooky opening scene, Senua’s voices are a constant accompaniment: guiding, chatting, bitching, reminiscing, worrying, encouraging, berating, arguing, bickering. You hear voices sighing and muttering, talking to you from another room, whispering just below the threshold of intelligibility. The fight scenes are graphic, but Senua’s voices are only connected with them in a positive way, shouting warnings and keeping the player safe. Against a horrific mental landscape Senua nevertheless develops an element of control, hearing a malevolent command but not acting on it, in a version of the struggle that is an everyday reality for many people living with voices. Hellblade is an unsurpassed testament to the phenomenological richness of auditory hallucinations, but also to the vast range of communicative and emotional functions they take on. You, the player, learn as Senua does which voices to trust, which will warn her helpfully in a fight and which represent her deepest terrors. Her trials capture the wisdom, central to the international Hearing Voices Movement, that voices represent emotional processes bearing difficult and unpalatable messages from the voice-hearer’s past. The game has been critically acclaimed, with some of the most gratifying reviews celebrating the efforts Ninja Theory have made to take the reality of psychosis seriously. The depiction of voice-hearing has figured prominently in the reactions, and I imagine that this will be one of the ways in which Hellblade will become a powerful force against stigma. It won’t be long, I suspect, before people struggling to explain the voices they are living with point to Senua’s experiences and say, to anyone who wants to push beyond the stereotypes, ‘There. It’s like that.’ Find reviews from two players with the online version of this piece, and learn more about the game at www.hellblade.com Charles Fernyhough is at the University of Durham
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podcast Sword and Scale swordandscale. com
A true crime fan’s paradise With so many documentaries becoming an instant hit, it is clear that true crime is more popular than ever. I have been a long-time listener of the podcast Sword and Scale, which gives me my true crime fix once a fortnight. Hosted by Mike Boudet, it is well researched and covers many different facets of true crime. From episodes on serial killers, cold cases and current court proceedings to those focusing on views of capital punishment or living a day in the life of an emergency responder, Sword and Scale is a true crime fan’s paradise. The most recent episode, episode 99, focused on male survivors of child sexual abuse. Recognising that this is often underreported and kept hidden, Mike reached out to these individuals and offered them the chance to share their story as well as looking at how it has continued to affect their adult lives. He hopes that through exposing this widespread problem, it will help others to come forward and speak up. This story, like some of the other episodes, is not for the faint-hearted. The men being interviewed share what happened to them, at times in quite graphic detail. Mike often encourages the interviewees to seek support or talk to a therapist; however, there were concerns about the stigma attached to doing this. This was particularly poignant for me: as a psychologist who works with young people who have had similar experiences, I can say that I never pass judgement about those who share these experiences with me. However, from what the interviewees share, it is clear to see how victims may be held back from doing this. Mike also seeks the opinions of professionals on some of his episodes. Clinical psychologist Dr Chad Lewing shed some light on the long-lasting effects of abuse as well as statistics, although it might have been beneficial to have more information on how to help victims of abuse. The highlight of the episode for me was the interview with former FBI agent Jim Clemente. He spoke about his own experience of abuse as a teenager and his involvement in the case to apprehend his own abuser later in his life. He suggests this led to him pursuing a career in the FBI, specialising in child sexual victimisation. In contrast with some of the earlier interviews in the episode, it was hopeful to see that there are positive outcomes for some victims of abuse. Although I am a fan of the podcast and I enjoy the variety of topics the episodes cover, the host has come under some criticism, most recently for his apparent lack of empathy towards individuals he has on the show. I have to disagree with this – I feel that there is a good focus on the victims discussed without glorifying the crimes or perpetrators. I was hooked from the first episode and I continue to be an avid listener. Reviewed by Angela Deegan, an assistant psychologist
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tv BoJack Horseman Netflix
online Overshadowed BBC Three
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Comedy and drama After a year-long wait, Netflix’s critically acclaimed animated series is back for a fourth season. The adult satirical comedy continues to follow the life of BoJack Horseman, an anthropomorphic horse and washedup star of fictional 90s sitcom Horsin’ Around. The show is well written and beautifully animated, and offers much in the way of psychologically interesting content. Beneath the its deceptively cartoonish exterior and colourful cast of characters, lies a profound tale of desperation and selfdestruction as BoJack – tormented by his insecurity and loneliness – struggles with the challenges of post-celebrity life. This makes for captivating viewing, with the show skilfully offsetting intelligent comedy with heart-breaking drama.
In line with its previous seasons, the show again delves into BoJack’s mental state – his depression, anxiety and alcoholism – but this time takes a much more concerted look at the character’s family history and relationship with his emotionally abusive mother as he cares for her in old age. Secondary to this is a series of storylines centred on the lives of BoJack’s friends, family and colleagues, from whom he has become increasingly alienated. As with the main plot, these narratives
do not shy away from controversial or difficult subjects; promoting awareness of psychologically salient issues, such as neurodegeneration, racism and sexual identity. In sum, BoJack Horseman has once again proved to be a success. It remains a fun satirical look at the absurdity of Hollywood culture, a relatable and emotionally devastating story of the hardships people endure in the pursuit of happiness, and arguably one of the most interesting psychological case studies currently on TV. Seasons 1–4 of BoJack Horseman are now streaming on Netflix Reviewed by Connor Pell, who is a PhD student at the University of Chester
Desperately realistic When I heard that BBC Three was airing a new miniseries focused on the development of a girl’s anorexia nervosa, I was sceptical. Do we need yet another addition to the parade of skeletal women on television dramas who ultimately all end up on pro-anorexia websites? What could we possibly gain from such a programme? In one enthralled sitting I discovered the answer: quite a lot. Eight sharp 10-minute episodes are filmed like a YouTube vlog, with the main character Imogene (Michelle Fox) talking directly into the camera, addressing her followers. In the first episodes the narrative revolves solely around Imogene’s life pre-anorexia. She laughs with her sister and mother, giggles at the fat under her arms, and boldly tells her new followers that she is set on starting a ‘new life’ of fitness and clean eating. It all seems pretty harmless. She puffs along on a 5k run and jokes about how unfit she is. She is gawky, likeable and (as an actress) wholly believable. Imogene’s anorexia is personified. Eva O’Connor (who also wrote the drama) plays the illness and taunts her throughout the series. Her character, aptly named Anna, is given no introduction. Her omnipresence becomes eerie as the episodes progress. Anna is the perfect embodiment of Imogene’s eating disorder – cruel, calculated and manipulative. However, perhaps more crucially, she acts as a friend and confidante, convincing her to ignore the advice of others and accompanying her on her pursuit of thinness. Whilst this clever dramatisation gives the viewers a deeper insight into eating disorders, it also narrates a wider societal idea. Imogene’s eating disorder is an entirely separate entity to her. A separate body, with separate ideas and beliefs. The illness is not the person. Therefore, it diminishes any notions of stigma or blame
from the outset. It is also good news for psychologists, as it is very much in keeping with recent accounts in the academic literature (for example see Matthew Pugh and Glenn Waller on understanding the ‘anorexic voice’). This makes it categorically different from its predecessor To the Bone, which failed to make the distinction between person and illness, resulting in some messy psychological undertones. The most remarkable part of Overshadowed is how it subtly turns up the intensity with every episode. The National Centre for Eating Disorders notes that in anorexia ‘one [stage] melts into the other quite fast.’ Imogene begins with almost no signs of an eating disorder and then spirals rapidly into anorexia, her illness gaining momentum with each episode. However, importantly, the depiction of her eating disorder never goes too far. It focuses on the emotional and psychosocial effects of her illness (her relationships start to crumble, she does badly at school, she dabbles with drugs) rather than the physical – which is in no doubt easier to capture on screen. This ensures that the portrayal never strays into territory that is too explicit. There are no close-up shots of Imogene’s body, no gory scenes of purging or bingeing, and not enough information to inspire mimics. The vlogging style means that we can only see what Imogene grants us access to. The plot often dips into the social politics of adolescence. Bad hair dye mistakes, first kisses, and boy dramas punctuate the story and serve as welcome contextual reminders. This is a real and raw account of anorexia, which feels desperately realistic. Reviewed by Madeleine Pownall, who is an undergraduate at the University of Lincoln
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the psychologist november 2017 culture
Searching for authentic memories in the digital age While it’s easy to get lost in the beauty of 1982’s Blade Runner, its sciencefiction film noir mashup vision of the future, or the meaning behind the story’s ambiguous ending (depending on the version you see), what I find most compelling about the film are its ideas about memory. The original film’s story is set in Los Angeles 2019 where androids, called replicants, are nearly indistinguishable from humans. What separates both groups are authentic memories. Replicants are programmed with real childhood memories, though they are not their own. The memories are borrowed from the experience of human children. Implanting these memories in replicants gives them a foundational identity, improving their ability to act human. However, having false memories also keeps replicants from being seen as sentient life worthy of empathy. Looking back, Blade Runner foreshadowed many of the issues psychology struggled with during the 1990s recovered versus false memories debate. Can our memories be tampered with? Can we verify that an event really occurred? How should we respond to memories we believe are false? Both psychological science and Blade Runner conclude that we do not experience binary truths or falsehoods. Our experiences exist on a spectrum of authenticity. Blade Runner 2049 expands on
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the original in every way, including its ideas about memories. In the sequel, everything is meticulously digitally documented, replicants know they are programmed with false memories, and the accuracy of memories doesn’t matter. What makes a memory real in 2049 is whether or not it makes you feel something. Once again, Blade Runner 2049 references issues impacting our world. The internet, social media, and smartphones have allowed for the digital documentation of nearly all world events and every aspect of our personal lives. Psychologists question how our always-on, socially connected technology is changing the way memory works. Does access to a search engine limit what we learn? How does digitally capturing an event change the way we remember it? Do social networks impact the type of information we believe to be true? How can we have authentic experiences as we travel through social networks that feel increasingly inauthentic? Psychology does not have satisfying answers to these questions, at least not yet. Though it is a cinematically stunning film that tackles contemporary issues, Blade Runner 2049 has problems. Like the original, character development is limited. This is particularly problematic with 2049’s female characters, who (with one exception) lack any agency of
their own. The film also feels less like a masterpiece and more like a blockbuster in its finale. But if you are a fan of the original, or of the science-fiction cyberpunk genre, Blade Runner 2049 is a mustsee. If you’re interested in these ideas but don’t care for the original Blade Runner, watch the rebooted Battlestar Galactica television series for a similar (more egalitarian) exploration of artificial intelligence.
film Blade Runner 2049 Denis Villeneuve (Director)
Reviewed by Ali M. Mattu PhD, Columbia University Medical Center, New York, Host of The Psych Show
Find more reviews online at www.thepsychologist.org.uk/reviews We are always looking for reviews of ‘psychology in culture’. If you come across a play, exhibition, film, podcast, TV or radio programme which you think suits a psychological perspective, get in touch with the Associate Editors Kate Johnstone (mail.katejohnstone@gmail.com) and Sally Marlow (sally.marlow@kcl.ac.uk). There are often also opportunities and suggestions put out via our Twitter feed @psychmag. We also run interviews with those involved in such cultural output… again, get in touch with suggestions.
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AZ the
psychologist
Karla Novak
to
K ...is for Kissing
Suggested by Susanna Martin Experimental Officer at the University of Bath @SusannaMarie ‘Kissing is something that we can all experience, but each kiss is unique with different, motivations, feelings and scenarios changing our experience. Kissing can be used as an excellent example for how varied psychology can be: we could research how people kiss, the age that they have their first kiss and the social acceptability, what is happening in the brain when we kiss or whether we could replicate a kiss in the virtual world.’
Awareness of touch deteriorates when we are distracted visually, and according to Alberto Gallace in his December 2012 article the opposite may also be true: hence the line as Carrie and Charles kiss in Four Weddings and a Funeral: ‘Is it still raining? I hadn’t noticed.’
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The author J.M. Barrie, in Peter Pan, had Wendy describe a ‘kiss’ as a ‘thimble’. In a January 2017 conversation with Chris Frith, author Rosalind Ridley explained
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coming soon… nasty or nice?; the age of illusions; Theresa Gannon; plus all our usual news, views, reviews, interviews, and much more...
how Barrie was very aware of the scientific developments of his day, and in many places seems to have anticipated ideas in psychology that only emerged after his death. The longed-for kiss has been used in psychological warfare, with Japanese propaganda leaflets used against the Americans in the Philippine Islands depicting a beautiful woman’s lips and the word ‘Remember?’ See Herbert Friedman’s January 2009 ‘Looking back: Sex in psychological warfare’. Of course, KISS is also a well-known acronym for ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid’. In his June 2012 ‘Opinion’ piece ‘The brave psychologist’, Paul Furey argued for simpler interventions to boost business success.
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09/10/2017 13:41
Find out more online at www.bps.org.uk
President Nicola Gale President Elect Professor Kate Bullen Honorary General Secretary Dr Carole Allan Honorary Treasurer Professor Ray Miller Chair, Membership and Standards Board Dr Mark Forshaw Chair, Education and Public Engagement Board Vacant Chair, Research Board Professor Daryl O’Connor Chair, Professional Practice Board Alison Clarke
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CPD workshops 2017/18 See p.18 Crisis, Disaster & Trauma Psychology Section Conference ‘Complex trauma within secure setting: Patients and staff views’ Northampton, 23 January 2018 See p.30 BPS Annual Conference Nottingham, 2–4 May 2018 See p.46 Division of Clinical Psychology Annual Conference Cardiff, 17–18 January 2018 See p.51 Division of Occupational Psychology Annual Conference Stratford-upon-Avon, 10–12 January 2018 See p.56 BPS conferences and events See p.64 Psychology in the Pub (South West of England Branch) Plymouth, 16 November; Exeter, 29 November 2017 See p.65 Undergraduate Research Assistantship Scheme See p.66 Distinguished Contributions to Psychology Education Award – call for nominations See p.81 Division of Forensic Psychology Annual Conference Gateshead, 19–21 June 218 See p.88
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The Society has offices in Belfast, Cardiff, Glasgow and London, as well as the main office in Leicester. All enquiries should be addressed to the Leicester office (see inside front cover for address).
The British Psychological Society was founded in 1901, and incorporated by Royal Charter in 1965. Its object is ‘to promote the advancement and diffusion of a knowledge of psychology pure and applied and especially to promote the efficiency and usefulness of Members of the Society by setting up a high standard of professional education and knowledge’. Extract from The Charter
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